{“Memory of the Digital” }
—“Ontology and Design: Models towards Virtual | Reality”;
—“Conceptual Models of Space | Time”;
—“Fiction-Narration-Space: the Ethics and Aesthetics of Virtual | Reality”.
The lectures offer, by way of media theory and digital humanities, and introduction to designers to how architecture is sublimating into new forms, requiring alternative aesthetics and processes of narration. The lectures are designed with a hardwired philosophical core which exposes “the virtual and the real” as a relation that requires critical “fictioning” / “modelling”. The series was meant as introduction for blending analog and digital domains, for creating speculative narratives bearing “queer” aesthetics and alternative ethics, and so forming pathways towards alternative modes of design and creative narration. The lecture became the material for the paper “Models and Fictions: the Archi-tectonic of Virtual Reality”(soon available online) that has been selected for publication and oral presentation (14-11-2019) by the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, section “Artificial Realities: Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation".
more info HERE.
Core Studio II, “The “Digital Archive” (or, “The Memory of the Digital”) Spring Semester 2019. Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD_ASD).
Course lead: Eva Castro
Digital Humanities (lecture series) and narrative lead: Federico Ruberto
VR/AR workshops: (IRL) Jacob Chen.Song, Young Bin, Yi Jun Ng
Design instructors: Christine Yogiaman, Jason Lim, Jane Chua, Deniz Manisali
Students:
G1: Nabila Br, Audrey Chan, Yun Chen, Emir Hamzah, Min Rui Goh, Darren Ho, Ching Kiang, Rachel Lau, Jeannette Lee, Sean Lee, Ahmad Rashidi, Matthew Tan, Natalie Tsnag, Naomi Wong, Xavier Xiao, Kelly Yeo. G2: Jane Cher, Jiahui Chiew, Yu An Chiang, Kee Ting Chin, Eion Goh, Chris Kyaw, Paris Lau, Ying Lim, Hsien Toong Lee, Grace Sim, Boon Kiay Tay, Kai Lin Yeo. G3: Naomi Bachtiar, Yingchu Chen, Benjamin Chong, Kheng Boon Heong, Wesley Koh, Xin Yan Lim, Clarissa Maharani, Simon Kyle Rocknathan, Tingxuan Song, Adler Teo, Shao Tian Teo, Mengcheng Wan, Guoxian Zhang. G4: Ran Chen, Hao Jing, May Thinzar Lin, Lucas Ngiam, Lin Po-Yu, Samson Sim, Arisa Teriyapirom, Benedict Tan, Qiaorou Wang.
VR Projects of 2019 Core Studio II are exhibited at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, section “Artificial Realities: Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation". Federico Ruberto’s essay “Models and Fictions: the Archi-tectonic of Virtual Reality” (laying down the theoretical core of Core Studio II) has been selected by the Triennale committee for publication and presentation in Lisbon (14-11-2019).
The Digital Archive”, Core Studio II at “SUTD”, Singapore University of Technology and Design. The studio explored the thresholds between the real and the virtual through the use of Virtual Reality.
“Memory of the Digital” is an experimental Studio that asked the students to design the space of the “digital archive”; a spatial (virtual/physical, or both…) archive required to be set in “generic” albeit self-consistent world. The first phase of the studio analyses current technological trends to define how they could affect the world to come. This phase involves science-fiction and “world-building”, it asks each student to design the future space where a chosen “digital archive” will be set (physically or virtually), and what actions a fictional community could perform through it in order to counter/transform/augment one of the current technological drives making society today.
At the same time the students are introduced to VR as means of production. VR is here taken not directly as a means of phenomenological representation, not only, but as a new tool through which design could challenge aprioristic notions of place, type and narrative; meaning, questioning the linear-accumulation of commodified experiences of spaces, in time. Within this hyperreal context the relationship between what we call ‘material’ and ‘digital’ will need to be readdressed and thus become the main driving core of the projects. As designers we must deal with a context in which experience is modeled and lived; as designers we must find a way to hold back the “real”, after its post-modern questioning. Each student design a micro environment that is both physical and virtual, architecture is then described in a twofold manner for its physical characteristics and for the potential happening that can be lived in it through augment-reality devices. For these reasons the students were asked to diagram both the physical and the virtual, finally simulating through virtual reality (Unreal Engine) how the intersection of the two realms can be played out in a consistent narrative, with hybrid components.
The students were directed by Eva’s and Federico’s general brief and by the sub-briefs given by the four design tutors: Christine, Jason, Jane and Deniz. The four studios could be synthesised in the following manner:
1—“archive of knowledge”; constructing a digital library spatialized by a particular structure of knowledge. They were asked to think about the navigation of space in procedural terms, meaning a library that reveals itself according to the digital walks of its user(s).
2—“archive of memory”; what does it mean to create a digital altar for oneself or for a community? What does it mean to create a space inhabited by a voice? What is to design the space of smell?
3—performative archive for participatory practices. The space of such archive was the stage of a theatre in which actions and performances are recorded, reiterated whilst re-performed in time in order to create new forms of community.
4— hybrid (digital-physical) archives; an attempt at thinking space as a literary event, spatially writing by writing the archive writing architecture as narrative and conceding narrative and spatial unfolding.