Gustavo Ribeiro The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark 391
or underground buried cables, walk along a nature trail and see virtual signs near
plants and rocks.” (Spohrer, 1996)
“By assigning URLs and wireless Web servers to physical objects, HP [Hewlett-
Packard] researchers are looking at what happens to life in a city, a home, and an
office when the physical world becomes browsable and clickable.
“Think of all the public places where inexpensive chips could squirt up-to-the-
second information of particular interest to you – such as the time your flight leaves
and animated directions to your destination in an unfamiliar city – directly to your
phone... Point your handheld computer at a restaurant, and find out what the last
dozen customers said about the food. Point your device at a billboard, and see clips
of the film or music it advertises, and then buy tickets or download a copy on the
spot.” (Rheingold, 2001, p.95)
The above scenarios can be perceived as ideals of convenience where a visit to a
new city or a walk in the park can be turned into a tailor-made interface with useful
information for performance and with mechanisms for shortening the distance that
separates desire from consumption. Alternatively they can be seen as nightmares of
control in which one’s moves become errands in a supermarket where everything is
electronically tagged and each purchase is fed into a consumer profile database.
But virtual tagging can also be seen as an operation inflicted on space which brings
about an objectification of its contents – space is treated as a desktop with clickable
icons. In L’oeil et l’esprit Merleau-Ponty states that “science manipulates things but
gives up living in them”^2 (Merleau-Ponty, in G.A. Johnson, 1993) – and the WorldBoard
project may be an extreme, and possibly naïf, example of that condition.
A simultaneity + compression device proposes the co-existence of multiple modes
of interaction between people and spaces, in which clicking at trees or buildings
with your mobile phone constitutes one layer. A simultaneity and compression device
suggests a transformation of space through the application of mediated interaction
amongst other modes. The fact that such modes are not necessarily mutually exclusive
- that they co-exist - amounts to a condition of simultaneity and compression.
Technologies such as WorldBoard construct simultaneity of events and compress
information in particular (physical) sites. The emerging, composite urban conditions
outline new fields of architectural and urban teaching, research and experimenta-
tion.
Device 5: Hypertext Cut-ups
With Tristan Tzara, the randomness in the act of pulling a poem out of a hat is as
much an iconoclastic performance as it is a creative method. And the engagement of
two artistic fields of expression – performance and poetry – is closer to an emblematic
bridge than it is to an active insertion of one creative method into another. Brion
Gysin’s cut-ups, on the other hand, build on the raw appropriation of the visual
mechanisms of collage and their transposition into writing (Gysin, 2001). Randomness
is extensively explored through the formulation of new contents. In that way, cut-ups
link the visual to the conceptual – the perceived to the intuitive. A simple variation
on cut-ups consists in dividing a text page into four different pieces and then recom-