Historian of science Andrew Pickering talked persuasively and provocatively about this dance between material and human agencies. The architect Christopher Alexander talked about the evolution of living patterns in built space as a complex of geometry, people's imaginations responding to the geometry, their action in that imagination and events constituted by their actions. We are taking our work beyond Alexander by designing and playing in the material field itself, using media and computational technologies to shape substrates of experience. For example,we set-up the technological substrate for the T-Garden in M3 so that the sounds that are generated are sensitive to your proximity, how you move and how you relate to others in the environment. There is no explicit convention as to what you have to say or how or where you have to stand. There are no set of steps, no lanes painted onto the floor, nothing proclaims 'you stand here, and the performer stands there.' Rather than determining conventions of behavioral management or perceptual codification, we are designing something like the physics of a world.
Public Experiments
We say that we are building experiments, but our laboratories are not bounded as techno-scientific labs, and our subjects are not simply objects. In fact, our laboratory, which is partly made of responsive media, is itself not a fixed object – its form is deformed under the action, the impact of these subjects who go through the space. And finally, our subjects may not be subjects at all, human or non-human, but rather diffused flows of agencies – fleshy, fabric, computational or media agencies.
Emergent (symbolic/computational/media)spatiality
We, of course, have been talking about physical space, but also in all these rooms in M3 there is a media space that is crucial because it allows us to fuse the physical and the symbolic (i.e.computational) so that they interact with each other. In other words, sponge is setting up the conditions of this interaction but not controlling it. The media processes animating our responsive spaces work at a level much finer than what human agents can reach. We are using computer technology to help build thick textures of experience. We work with physical and fleshy experience as well but that's not as easily mutated as digital media or code. In sum, we have an architectural space, a symbolic or computational space and finally, a media space, and all of these spaces interact with each other in unpredictable and surprising ways.
Deformation of media
Unpredictability, however,is far from randomness. We are aiming to build evocative spaces of play. For example, T-Garden's para-physics has a very tangible response that people learn to play as they move through various media. Their actions take on more and more meaning as the people move in relation not only with each other but also with the material and media agencies of the space.We are deeply concerned with how people, media and matter dancing together build the felt meaning of our lives.
Unstable media
This dimension of instability we dealt explicitly in our project M2. In M2, we were talking about the instability of media,the instability of language, the instability of these symbolic structures that people make. However, one of the features of M2 was,at bottom a phenomenological stability. We think this stability comes from matter, that we are material beings and that that materiality gives us the stability of experience. The example that we use over and over again is the following: When you walk into a room and you put your foot on the floor you do not think that the atoms of your foot will turn into gamma radiation, you do not think that your foot will tunnel quantum-mechanically through the wood. One could say it's by convention that your body expects the floor to sustain you. But it's deeper than convention, it's the sedimented experience,to deliberately use phenomenological language.
...vs phenomenological stability
This is the profound part of our experiential stability. The mystery we discover is that we are able to move in the world without that kind of material anxiety. We may have psychological, historical and emotional anxieties from isolation, loneliness, (all of which we dealt with in the media of M2) – all of these symbolic anxieties, and yet most of the time we have a material stability. That is what makes human experience possible, this is the substrate of human experience. However, in M2 we were also dealing with another type of instability – that of haunting. That under all of these techno-systems of control and vision and hearing and all of these assaults on perception from media machines, there lies something fragile – verging on the edge of disappearance...
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