for.ward
In 1981, the first personal computer was launched on the market – the Sinclair ZX81. Hardly ten years later, at the beginning of the 1990’s, the World Wide Web entered the living rooms and work spaces of the entire world. And with the era of Web 2.0, the Internet at the start of the 21st century has prevailed as the most important information media of the present: googling, email, chatting, up- and downloading of files, online banking and online auctions – the Internet has become an integral part of our daily life.
We communicate without knowing each other, even without ever becoming corporeal. And the competent handling of these information and communication technologies has become a cultural technique, equal to reading, writing and arithmetic. The question arises: How does this affect our cultural experience? Will we consume even concerts and theater performances from our easy chair at home? Will public spaces where people meet each other become obsolete?
Restricted sensuality
The Internet of the near future will be three-dimensional. While even today projects are being presented with 360° vistas, the customer of tomorrow will move within a cyberspace of infotainment levels, gaming environments and consumer worlds. Seminars and meetings will be held in artificial conference rooms, and the cybernaut – endowed with display glasses, data helmet and data gloves – will move through virtual supermarkets, cinemas, libraries, museums, trade fair halls or entire urban agglomerations. Via force reactions and tactile feedback, proportions and textures of objects and spaces will become tangible in three dimensions. Everything will be really close to real life. So why go to the trouble of a “real life” performance? Maybe because virtual means: present only in its potentiality. And the potentialities of virtual reality are finite. The restricted sensual experience in the apparent reality cannot replace the complex sensual perception of the real environment – or can it?
Unforgettable memories
Going to a real concert for example is more than an audio-visually reproducible result. The curiosity and anticipation, the tingling sensation in the air, the pleasant goosebumps – the most beautiful experiences are revealed in synaesthetic perception. These impressions become unforgettable memories. We all know this: a smell or even a whiff of an aroma will evoke entire picture stories in front of one’s inner eye. A tickling in the nose can liberate a whole scale of feelings of happiness. Feeling the warmth of the setting sun on the nape of one’s neck during an open-air concert, the secretive whispering of the audience before the performance, the shuffling of chairs, the conversation afterwards, holding a glass of champagne in one’s hand – the sum of all of these synaesthetic experiences turns such small adventures into vivid, valuable and veritable moments of life. Only the active interaction between the inner and outer senses will develop a genuinely public spirit. The ability for logical and aesthetic discernment – the taste – depends on this public spirit. Taste? An abstract concept that accompanies us every step of the way. It is part of our everyday sensory perception, it forms our consciousness of what is quality and what is beauty. So how could a virtual experience be truly beautiful?
Seductive magic
The frantic technological progress of computer simulations and the increasing performance of the systems lead to increased possibilities to mimic reality in the virtual world. The visual and acoustic imitation of reality has seen a quantum leap during the last decade: in another five to 10 years, American researchers want to launch the “virtual cocoon”, a multi-sensory helmet intended to address all five senses simultaneously, thus reaching the consciousness level called “immersion”. That is to say, the user will feel their own body only in a reduced form or not at all anymore. Can this work? The fact that you feel an effect on and within your own body, e.g. when watching a play, a musical or any other exciting performance, is the secret of perception close to life. The magic results from interaction, from immersion and resurfacing, from the secure knowledge that the staging that the audience is part of is on the one hand fiction but on the other hand is just as real as the sweet taste on your lips or the tingling of your fingertips. This is the seductive magic of an individual, yet comprehensive experience.
A different kind of virtual world is being created by i-cocoon – a black, man-sized sphere that people can enter. Tino Schädler has developed this idea of a retreat option, of a separate world in the midst of hectic reality, a room whose inside is completely display-clad. An information and communication portal, installed in public places or at airports, accessible via laptop computer or smartphone. At present, it still is only an idea, but i-cocoon may well turn into a familiar sight a few years from now, just like phone booths used to be.
New laws of nature
But the future will have even more to offer: in an artificial experiential environment, new laws of nature will be written. Gravity will be suspended, proportions will be distorted, space and time will resolve. Aromatic designers will mix new smells, programmers will create abstract planets and universes, and scientists will probably conduct a dialog to describe the meaning and sense of an artificial pseudo reality. Soon virtual art, virtual wellness, virtual holidays will become well established anglicisms like a user-interface in the Web community; and who knows: maybe in the virtual space of the future, a wholly new taste will develop – a new virtual consciousness for quality and beauty. But as exciting as these possibilities may be, for most of us even in the future a virtual concert will have a hard time beating the real experience of participating in a live concert. Even though not all of us will stick their tickets on their ego wall at home afterwards.
www.contractworld.com/48195?x=1