William Mitchell... Recombinant Architecture ..Doors 2
R e c o m b i n a n t A r c h i t e c t u r e
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I n t r o d u c t i o n
(Mitchel points at the large video-projection screen behind him) Being in this split condition is rather a nice way to introduce the issues I want to talk about this afternoon: the relationship between physical presence and telepresence and the relationship between physical space and digital space. Behind me is my image on a video screen. I feel a little bit like Citizen Kane: I wonder how many other speakers have felt this way?
I wonder what it would be like if I ducked behind the podium so you could only see the virtual presence on the screen behind me. What would be lost? Would you only lose a few rather redundant bits out of the presentation? I suspect not. There's something interesting about the relationship here between the physical body and the virtual body; the physical space of this auditorium and some other kinds of spaces being created here behind me. Roughly, that is the theme I want to develop as I talk to you this afternoon.
As homework for this discussion, I looked into the relationship of electronic media to the home--specifically, the history of speculation about interactive television in the home and its effect on domestic life. It turns out that these speculations go back surprisingly far.
- This is the earliest one that I found. It has acquired some currency
lately. This predecessor of the marketing videos of Time, Warner and
AT&T is from a Punch cartoon of 1879. It shows something that the
cartoonist labeled Edison's telephonoscope. It claimed to transmit
light as well as sound. We see Edison's telephonoscope (imagined, of course)
opening up a video window above the bedroom mantelpiece of a comfortable
Victorian villa. The father and mother in comfortable English suburbia are
teleconferencing with their children in Sri Lanka. Of course, this was
vaporware, but perhaps no more than some of the services we're going to be
promised soon. It just took a little longer than expected to get to market
and that is a common enough occurrence.
Let's briefly examine this pay-for-view dejá vu. Firstly, we see a very big screen, viewed by a group from a distance. This is obviously a television and not a personal computer. The cartoonist was innocent of the concept of bandwidth, of course, so a lot of pixels are being pushed through the screen. We don't see any compression artifacts, either, which perhaps the cartoonist might have imagined if more was known about this technology in 1879.
The other thing that will gladden the hearts of the television people is that they're using nice simple remotes, not keyboards. These remotes are being used to capture sound. They're actually rather elegant. Both the father and mother are speaking into microphones. They're capturing sound, but we may imagine them to be performing some control functions as well. But where is it in domestic space? How does it fit into the idea of the Victorian home?
It's interesting to compare the Victorian and the modern conception of this. In very Victorian fashion, it's on the mantelpiece, like some kind of ornament. It's in the bedroom; the protagonists are in different time zones. You can see that it's afternoon in Sri Lanka and evening by the fire back in England.
Interestingly enough, this device is identified with the half, not a replacement. Somebody complained the other day that we have both here. The video screen above the half.
What this expresses is the powerful fascination of the idea that human kind can somehow overthrow the tyranny of distance. That we can maintain contact and perform transactions independently of bodily location. And we have heard that theme sounded over and over again during this conference. It is a powerful idea that will grip the human imagination for some time to come.
In the last three decades, this idea has moved towards reality. Before coming to the main part of my talk, I'd like to briefly recount a few of the highlights of the story of slightly more than three decades of translating this idea. It was imagined by the Victorians, as were many scientific ideas before they came to fruition. I'd like to take you through some of the landmarks along the way to making this a reality. First, in the sixties, we began to see the first working prototypes of interactive computer graphics systems.
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