Everything in the World We Need.

One thing we have come to expect of new technologies is that they make the inanimate world around us more aware of our needs as sentient beings. This could be as simple and convenient as the coffee pot that starts perking ten minutes before our alarm goes off in the morning to the complexity of a mobile robotic surveillence force patrolling our gated community that captures and dispatches potentially dangerous intruders before we notice any danger exist.

In other words, we'd all like a personal guardian angel, just like that show on TV, "Touched by an Angel". One major communications company even uses this scenario in a television commercial where one catastrophe after another is averted until the angel is destracted by, what else, some technological gadgets in a store window and his human charge meets a tragic end.

This quite resonable assumption that we want to live in in a world of animated objects that anticipate our needs drives projects in software development, artificial intelligence and the military and has given us, if nothing else, the Internet along with those cute but pesky assistants that keep popping up in Microsoft products. Not quite Della Reese but, as Nicholas Negroponte keeps saying, we're getting there.

This also sounds very much like the house Bill Gates is building for himself -- a "smart house" full of gadgets everyone in the future will want to buy -- and heavily dependent on the developers and programmers of these gadgets to anticipate what needs to be anticipated (does Bill like the Mona Lisa on the flat screen in the morning or the Winslow Homer?).

This is a projection of the interior of a particular corporate "self" onto the built world of objects and unless you happen to fit into the marketing demographics of the corporation producing this world it's unlikely you will find much of your "self" projected.

Greg Lynn and his associates seem to be taking another route to creating this responsive world by "mis-applying" the technology at hand. Instead of CAD programs and hardware that simulates the built world using Euclidian geometry they start with animation software produced for the film industry that enables objects in the screen space to be, in a rational cartesian world, irrational. This allows for a great deal of informational overload to be input into the design of this space that would normally be filtered out so that what results is a representation of a complex ecology rather than a projection of an imaginary individual and provides resonance with the rhythms and flows of everyday life in its dynamic structure.

This isn't to say that there isn't room for the unique individual projection of self into this virtual space as well and that is where I think Wisniewski's "ScanLink" provides a counterpoint that nevertheless has links. The most obvious point of linkage, but one that is probably coincidental, is the use of the sound of the "Doppler Effect". In ScanLink it signals some change in the data flow while it was used in another digital form in the design of the H2 House to represent the flow of traffic next to the building.

ScanLink's iconographic representation in the form of a triptych has religious overtones reinforced by the presence of an "unseen hand" that is in control of the navigation yet unknowable (unless we crack the code). Only the ebb and flow of information and the manipulation of the control panels is made visible. It anticipates a need the artist thought I might have for a "display of explicit relationships between web objects" and as far as I know I don't have that need.