ARC3020Y F
Instructor(s): Lara Lesmes, Fredrik Hellberg
Meeting Section: L0105
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

With half of the world's population on the Internet, is it not strange that we never see any crowds as our cursors sail across the flat plains of our screens?

Outside of chat boxes and comment sections the internet seems empty. The ways in which we gather and express ourselves in this medium are limited by its ability to represent us and the agency we are granted.

The internet enabled social interaction in and around previously disconnected digital assets, turning the formatting of information into the shaping of public realms. Designers and coders have gone from indexing data to building “public squares”, and we sleepwalked from the harmless website into the treacherous minefield of social media. As architects we have a plural understanding of the public realm that is at once experiential, practical, and legal. How do we contribute to the shaping of emerging virtual worlds in ways that align with civic values of openness, inclusivity, and sustainability?

This year our studio at Daniels will continue to work towards models of virtual Architecture for the Immersive Internet, now with a focus on how we gather around information on the internet. The mission of the studio is twofold: to design the means to organise and display data in virtual architecture, and to facilitate a gathering in such space.

Our interest in the gathering comes with special attention to the body and its virtual representation in space. An avatar is the embodiment or personification of an individual, a group, and even concepts or attitudes. Also, having a body on the internet means that our scrolls turn into strolls, reshaping the space around us, physical and virtual alike.

By the middle of the 21st century media will be spatial. As we enter the internet with our full bodies, the previously flat digital world gains a third dimension and thus becomes of architectural concern. Both because pages are turning into spaces, but also because digital content is emancipating from the screen and into our rooms, streets, and landscapes by virtue of immersive technologies.

The internet is inherently a telecommunications network. Gathering in virtual space will inevitably deal with the transfer and organisation of information, the archiving and display of data artifacts. For centuries architects have had to design architecture that organises and displays data, such as libraries -which mainly deal with text based documents, religious buildings -which often deal with visual impressions, or archives - where objects are organised in space. While these are invaluable examples to learn from, their static nature is significantly challenged once datasets are plugged to the live traffic of the internet. However these examples are what our bodies know and are used to, they are well tuned to the human capacity to experience and absorb information in space. The architecture of the immersive internet must find a way to present large and dynamic datasets in ways that are legible and digestible to people. 

The studio uses immersive technology for both experimentation and representation of projects, providing training for the use of VR headsets and real-time software (Unreal Engine). We will be teaching VR workflows that include: Blender, Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, and Spoke by Mozilla Hubs

The studio sets a research framework so that we can establish a small research community, however the projects are heavily student-led. On a scale of 1 to 10, (1 being student-led research, and 10 being very directed research and assignments) > Research 1 = 6, Research 2 = 2

We are not planning to travel as a group. Each student is encouraged to travel for research where relevant.

The studio is led by Space Popular Directors, Lara and Fredrik, who are conducting all the teaching (there are no TAs). We will be teaching Research 1- fall semester in a hybrid format (4-5 of 14 sessions in person), and Research 2 - spring semester will be in person.