Breakout for Two is a cross between soccer, tennis, and the popular computer game “Breakout”, which can be played by two players over a distance.
The players, who can be miles apart from each other, both throw or kick a ball against a local, physical wall. On each wall is a projection of the remote player, enabling the participants to interact with each other through a life-sized video and audio connection. The experience is much like being on a tennis court — each player occupies his/her part of the field and the wall represents the net or boundary between the players, over which they can communicate.

The aim is to enable social relationship to develop when the participants are physically distant, perhaps even on opposite sides of the world. Sports over a Distance might offer new opportunities to bond with new and old friends, maybe making the world a smaller place and supporting cross-cultural understanding and cosmopolitan thinking.

Similarities:

• same setup: life-size videoconference projection screen / camera
• connects people in different places
• people would respond well to the immersive character of the setup

Dissimilarities:

• entertainment type rather than free communication
• centralised public location rather than privacy of home
• goal driven and computer coordinated rather than free medium

I am a bit stuck. I really need to get back to my Research Methods essay and my Extended essay from last year and figure out which way I want this blog to go from now on…

In the meantime…

Could we call the theatre setup virtual architecture…? It is certainly an art very close to architecture. I find that it is representation of architecture with focus on sound, lighting, ambiance… A space designed to immerse the audience in the story taking place on the stage. Function is secondary, effect on spectators crucial…

The first song of my favourite musical Notre-Dame de Paris called Le temps des Cathedrales, also good for drunk singing… Just avoid doing it when French people are around, like I did…

Also, this view of the Royal Mile from Princes Mall always reminds me of a theatre set…

I used to keep a diary of dreams, hoping that they would help me recall / recognise a dream and this is what my efforts ended up crashing on. Eventually I got too lazy to get up and turn the lights on several times a night to write my dreams down. I thought I’d just write them down in the morning, and really, writing dreams down regularly does help you remember them better in the morning but it was not enough and eventually I went back to uncontrolled dreaming.

Now I feel like I should give it another go. Mostly because back then it really did work for a bit and I had a few amazing flying dreams before I got lazy… It was very surprising for me to see how hard it is to fly even when you know you’re dreaming a dream. Its almost like your mind rejects the idea as impossible. But in the land of dreams, nothing is impossible…

And this brings me the what I wanted to explore… the dream architecture. And no, not talking about the architect from the movie where things were realistically recreated. I’m talking about the possibilities that only dreams offer. Levitating buildings for example. The laws of gravity, or any other physical laws do not apply in this world. They are only in our minds but our dreams reflect what is in our minds… We can, however, learn to control them to a point where our only limit is our imagination…

In Inception, the dreams were mostly solid though. This was because according to the technology available in the movie, the protagonists were in other peoples’ dreams most of the time. In your own dreams however, you control everything. ‘What if this door is locked? It is… But hey, I have a key in my pocket…’ And the key would be there!

This reminds me of another piece of work where the world of dreams has been explored. In Robert Jordans The Wheel of Time Series there is a World of Dreams called Tel’aran’rhiod. I am not a big Robert Jordan fan, but I have to give him credit for Tel’aran’rhiod, which I thought was the most interesting part of the book as it analysed the way we dream pretty accurately, and gave me a few ideas of what I could do in an imaginary world of my own. Now i just need to get the hang of it again…

I do like the idea of being able to watch a dozen of windows at night, like little televisions… an opportunity that the city architecture often offers and that curtain users often ruin. Another reason why I’m not bothered by others doing the same.

During my exchange year in Sweden, I was given an assignement that involved producing a 3 minute long video on a specific topic: Private / Public. I decided to do it on Voyeurism, an implication of the dense city architecture… the relationship between light and darkness, inside and outside, seen and unseen…

I’ve been wanting to share this video for ages as it is one of my favourite projects but was too self-conscious to upload it on facebook and a bit worried about their copyright policy.

Anyway… The video is devided in three parts / three minutes, each one getting a bit more involved… from the simple statement that at night inside becomes public and outside private, through the question of what do we do with this to how do we feel about it…

Not sure if this post has anything to do with my Master’s project but hey, I can put video’s together… sort of…

What you can see is mostly silos to hotel conversion and some light emailing…

Pathology: Mac syndrome clearly visible from the graph! Scroll function of the mouse uncertain.

Personally I thought it was the best ride there. True, it lacked the hugeness of Stealth, in appearance and in statistics, or the appealing creepiness and popularity of Saw the Ride… Nevertheless, I thought that the surreal experience it offers made up for all of that…

First of all, we walked through a series of strange corridors, not knowing what to expect… Is this a haunted house and is something about to jump out and grab your leg? Anyway, I kept looking around and slowing down before every corner trying not to seem like a wuss in front of my friends…

Eventually, we found it… it was a little roller coaster train, 5 double cars… I have to admit I took the first one for a better view! Just before the train starts moving we heard a recording “Warning, Critical Error detected, do not proceed.” Yay! Then the train starts rolling backwards. What seemed like a haunted house that you ride through in a car like one of those fun fair things turned out to be a proper roller coaster…

From that moment on I started loving it… it was the immersive character of the space that did it for me…

The entire ride took place in a pitch dark pyramid of a building, as I found out later… The odd spotlight here and there added to the disorientation. Basically I had no idea what was happening, whether I was upside down, horizontal or upright and mostly, how big this space actually was, what shape it was, where was up and where was down… It seemed like there was absolutely nothing below, above, or around me… all I knew was there for sure was my friend Berke Ricketti yelling DORITOOOOOOS!!! only four car behind me although if I didn’t know where he was I would have thought it was at least 30m away…

It was one of those hard-to-imagine spaces of absolute nothingness… apart from those little mad lights…

… and the echo that made the eerie sounds contribute to the sensation of never-ending darkness…

Anyway… Peter Kogler’s projection piece at MUMOK, Vienna (2008)

I dont know much about this but from what I’ve been explained so far, it is a project started in order to get people / families / children involved in outdoor activities and lots of walking. And what’s even better… it involves treasure hunting!!!

My sister and her friend came to see me at work this morning and presented me with plenty of strange artifacts, tagged and trackable devices and collectors pieces, some related to their characters / avatars, some that have been attributed a mission and are on their way to complete it and some that are just meant to travel, hide and be repetitively discovered and hidden again.

Right now, the two of them are on they walk around Arthur’s Seat in search of more hidden treasure with their GPS navigation gadget . From what I’ve understood, these hiding places are not meant to be discovered by uninvolved people… something that will make me want to lift every rock from now on. On I could just join the Geocachers but it is less fun without breaking the rules!

So apparently they have found a treasure piece in the Meadows, where thousands of people have been hanging out in the past two months and no one has drunkenly come across any of these??? How do I know that no one has? Apparently all the hiding places are monitored and kept track off and if something went missing, the Geocatchers would know about this. And surely I would have found out from them just now!

Intriguing, intriguing…

Why do I find this fascinating…? I guess it is one of those things that makes you perceive the space around you differently… Different scale, different points of interest, in a way it is like a quest video game… Also the thing of tagging items and monitoring them as they travel around the globe to complete their mission… I can’t put my finger on it just yet but will get there…

This proposal was inspired by social networking, starting with online chatting and ending with the facebook phenomenon. It combines the idea of a longhouse and flat/house-share. As the name suggests it is related to the idea of a kaleidoscope, which involves the notion of infinity and endlessness of reflections.

The design process started by simply adding a virtual room to an existing, physical one. In the same way one would be viewing friends’ profiles, or talking to someone through a webcam, one of the walls in this room is an interface which connects with someone else’s room as if it was a continuation of the physical space.

From the idea of a kaleidoscope, or just two simple mirrors facing each other, an interface on each of the opposite walls would create a ‘virtual longhouse’ of the users of this system.

This Kaleidohouse then connects a potentially very large number of physical houses from all over the world in real time and virtual space, at the same time offering an infinite number of different combinations.

It is basically a form of a homely flat-share i.e. a real home to its owner, a place of his own, that nevertheless keeps the lively social spirit of a shared accommodation. Such system would obviously require possibilities of privacy regulation to keep the two aspects in a harmonic balance.

There is no prototype of a physical house a number of which would form the Kaleidohouse. Any room with interfaces and cameras on the opposite walls and an appropriate width of space would be eligible. Each space is therefore different, unique, and it reflects its inhabitant’s tastes and way of life. According to the 6 degrees of separation theory the spaces could evolve from the simplest studio to a luxurious villa in less then 5 steps and anyone at all could appear on each user’s 6th screen.

Nevertheless, an example of such physical house designed for the purpose of being part of the Kaleidohouse is a linear succession of spaces within which the cameras and the interfaces are moving.

The interface here is a heliodisplay located in front of a window which is equipped with dark shutters. With the shutters open, the house is literally see-through with the opposite external walls fully glazed.

Closed shutters imply that projection is taking place in the interior, thus hidden from ‘the physical’ outside but quite possibly exposed to all Kaleidohouse inhabitants all over the world.

At nighttime there is no need for the shutters and the Kaleidohouse is open to its ‘physical’ outside as if the projection was taking place on the external façade.

Everyone’s home could then become, at a certain time, a public place in a way, each one’s personal contribution to the shared virtual world.

This proposal then completely reverses the conventional values of a home, traditionally understood as a private place where one can escape the public mess. Kaleidohouse is a shared social space and it is outside in the open that one can seek solitude.

Just starting to explore this blog thing… patience!