Evan Lee | IDEAS

Over the past decade programmers and developers have made monumental steps to deliver a digitally fabricated experience that simulates what we can comprehend, a three-dimensional environment that can be observed and manipulated through our input. My own experiences with the medium, however, have only underscored the fact that the simulation of a digital interface is fundamentally different than its real counterpart. This became abundantly clear during a walkable VR demonstration where the visual representation of a barrier did not restrict my movement. I could walk through objects and out the opposite side. This kind of disconnect means that although we can see and occasionally hear these new simulated realms, we are ultimately limited to being observers rather than occupants.

Technology cannot currently allow us to touch what we see and hear, and I wonder if it ever will. To experience physical objects with all of our senses could potentially lead to violent ends. Given the current parameters of visual and auditory experience, we can interact with digital worlds but they cannot interact with us. This condition is exemplified by how we view ourselves in these digital environments. From the user’s perspective, a digital representation of his or her body is not visible. Without being able to see relative objects, such as looking down one’s arms or glimpsing one’s torso, virtual space and digital realms exist as a disembodied and existential state.

Psychologically, these conditions are foreign to the human experience as we know it. Because the sensory input of touch is manifested throughout the body, why should digital environments recreate a body if it is not linked to your physical one? Without seeing one’s self, this current iteration of virtual spaces inherently creates a metaphysical experience that is not connected to the body and exists purely in the mind. Apart from dreams, this is the first instance that the human condition can operate independently from the body, from the reality of touch. What if we were to view such implementations as liberating, that we can create and inhabitant an entirely new reality, one that follows its own logic, instead of simulating ours?

Much of what we can rationalize is based around its relative size to that of the human body. The scale of objects and landscapes is how we gain understanding of a place or use. Navigating a digital environment without a representational body is navigating a world without scale, as there is nothing to make associations with. Remember Alice’s confusion when she fell down the rabbit hole and entered a “Wonderland” where her body could no longer be relied on to orient her? Virtual landscapes are devoid of physical sensorial input and endlessly fractal due to not having a relative scale.

As more applications such as VRchat allow for VR communication and landscapes, how might we begin to understand the implications of these environments and design to their specific conditions, specifically ones that recognize the separation of the mind and body? Disassociation from the body can allow the manifestation of bizarre and spectacular landscapes, but may also allow for a variety of people to connect and communicate through a shared experience regardless of physical limitations. These digital landscapes will create environments where voice and thought are predominant rather than the physical realm. Landscape architects could become prominent figures in how the spatial qualities of these digital environments are assembled. These spaces might not be physical environments at all, but may have the ability to be developed into new, habitable spaces that organically develop over time.

Evan Lee is a designer in the Laguna Beach studio.

Imagery from Shigeto: “Hovering” by 79 Ancestors, part of Territories VR episodes. To view full video, please visit its website at: http://bit.ly/2Ecm1sp

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Posted by Evan Lee
in Arts and Culture, Education
on 9 February, 2018

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The methods used to illustrate our ideas about landscape consist of marks and data that create a network of information that informs us and others about designed works. These methods are premised on a system that displays a final product, one that is polished but also stagnant and unable to be compromised. By contrast, much of the development processes of an actual landscape (i.e., growth, seasonality, singularity, and decay) are not at all prevalent in the visual language that represents the field of landscape architecture.

The introduction of new methods of constructing drawings digitally as well as digitizing analog documents is an exploration that much of the field of landscape architecture is not utilizing let alone exploiting. Landscape documentation has not been fully explored and the complexity that a site already contains or may contain in the future is left unconsidered, without a thought or debate. Layers of time, amorphousness, and potential are each exploratory paths that cannot be documented through built form, but are important aspects of a project that need to be developed and represented.

A representative drawing, one that depicts a single idea, is the predominant form of our visual communication. The integration of a designer’s process and individuality (personal signature) is a missing component that could add fascinating information and personalization into constructed illustrations. The documentation of such processes allows for a project to record ideas that are becoming instead of being, ones that could reveal many facets of an intricate idea. The absence of process in our drawing methods not only dismisses that opportunity but creates a distance between designers and people external to the discipline and further separates the potential for collaboration to strengthen built forms and systems. A construct drawing, on the other hand, one that is built from many forms of media, contains pieces that allow viewers to glimpse the people who built them. The result is much more interesting work that could explain the considerations informing the placement of objects within a landscape system and what influences other forms of design have upon the creation of a space.

These forms of drawing are by no means new and have been practiced for decades using found images, different tools for making marks, and media surfaces. A shift in personal values that places emphasis on the creation and documentation of individual process is what’s required now for the prevalence and use of such drawings. As technologies and various forms of media multiply, the limitations of traditional drawing methods will become obsolete, as will the inability to convey the necessary complexity of landscape systems and the processes used to complete a design. It’s time to start exploring methods used to create and convey ideas that will not presuppose an exclusive relationship between our documented work and our thought processes.

This drawing by Perry Kulper, an architect and associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, was created in response to the Central California History Museum competition. Kulper’s new book, Pamphlet Architecture 34: Fathoming the Unfathomable, with Nat Chard, is available through Princeton Architectural Press.

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