The proliferation of media technologies has complexified and evolved our understanding of a number of concepts. Developments of such things as the printing press, perspective, photography, film and video have problemitized questions around such issues as representation, authorship and the construction of subjectivity. Digital media has accelerated and created permutations in each of these previous forms, and now several facets of its developments are reforming how we understand space and spatial experience.

One of these facets is seen in the forms and cultural operations of the computer user interface. One way to consider the interface is that it attempts to abstract or interpret the activities in one domain to make them simpler and more efficient to operate from another. Between the mediated environment and the physical environment, interfaces have become increasingly complex. Moving from relatively simple mechanisms as the book, the radio dial and the channel selector, to the contemporary computer graphic user interfaces, this construct has moved to a point of complexity such that it utilizes advanced narrative techniques of metaphor and analogy to bridge the realms of the mediated world and the physical world.

As the methodologies for presenting mediated information change, the consideration for the types of activities they can enable change as well. The current desktop GUI metaphors were developed over 20 years ago, (in fact this month is the 30th anniversary of the first public demonstration of a mouse) and were seen as a solution to providing access to the type of computing activities of the time. With the recent development of the internet and web as an important domain for social and cultural activities, engaging several orders of magnitudes more information then was considered at the time of GUI developments, we are provoked to devise new concepts of what it is that computers do and how should they go about doing them. Where this development will be seen is in the nature of how we conceive of what space consists of and how it operates.

We used to have a situation where we made distinctions between space and spatial experience with media and mediated experience. The frame of a painting, the furniture of the television or the architecture of a movie theater, operated as interfaces between one realm of cultural operations and another. The interface was a way of setting off mediated experience from experiences derived from a physical world. Space was engaged through navigation. Constructed spaces had logics that were informed such things as functionality, social structures, gravity and materiality. Media was engaged through such mechanisms as narrative and symbolic linkages.

Now of course there has always been a role for narrative in physical space - plazas, statues, facades, murals, etc. What is distinguishing about this moment is the incredible increase in the quantity of mediated streams that we must now inhabit and derive coherent experiences from. What we find is that we have a situation where there is a confluence of media and space. Mechanisms that supplied structure and coherency from each of these realms are now applicable to the other.

Space is narrativized. Media is spatialized. An overt understanding of how the interface operates is now informing the construction of contemporary public space. Media spaces are no longer read, they are browsed and navigated.

Physical space is now read. As an audience/spectator/consumer, we now have more determined attention bandwidth (otherwise known as TIME) to read physical spaces then we do to read mediated spaces. The amount of time we spend in a given physical space, or how we move through them, is more predictable then the amount of time we give to mediated events. Temporality has been stripped from our mediated structures and now exists through spatial mechanizations. These mechanisms of structuring experience are reversing and switching. Developments are occuring in the nature of how our spatial world is becoming a mediated experience and how our mediated worlds are becoming spatialized in order to effectively engage them.

In this phase of the Shock of the View exhibition we have two projects that present aspects of this transformation in how we consider space to operate and what characteristics the concept of space embodies.

The interface to the internet that is presented by the Scanlink project presents a visualization of the connectivity of the internet. Using familiar tropes from the current web interfaces (scroll bars, frames, web addresses), but placed in a reconfigurable dynamic formal relationship, we are allowed to establish a contextual relationship between multiple individual streams of information, providing for a shaping of internet content. In this way we get an expression of the multiplicity of these information structures that are expressed by a clever replaying of the current familiar forms of interface mechanisms. This strategy for creating an expression of the mutable form and shape of the internet is perhaps a more poignant engagement of the spatial relationships that these multiple information streams necessitate then cruder examples of Cartesian representations of 3D object forms.

In the Architecture of Greg Lynn we see several developments in how the engagement of digital spatialization tools transform both the design process of developing architectural forms and the type of formal concerns within the architecture itself. One key to this is the use of a particular type of software tool, Alias Studio/Animator, that was developed and refined for use in two industries, industrial design and film/video computer animation. Traces of both of these disciplines are visible in the resulting architectural design. Alias uses a particular modeling technology of non-uniform rational b-splines (NURBS) to describe object geometry. This type of tool provides for easy expression of curvilinear forms. During the late 80's Alias software became the primary software design tool of the automobile industry. One result of this was the proliferation of the lozenge design of cars and minivans. The design of the Ford Taurus is almost a default primitive object in these software applications. While these forms may originate as a precise derivative of the technological means of their production they become emblematic expressions of their particular cultural and technological moment when monumentalized in architecture.

The other interesting aspect of this architecture is its inherent temporality. As many of the tools in this software are for the articulation of forms in time, the architecture seems to exist in mid-gesture, a still frame from a larger temporal interplay. This is both seen in the general overall forms and the way in which one moves through the spaces it defines, the shapes morphing and shifting around oneself.

Both of these projects demonstrate the transposition between spatial and mediated knowledges, forms and experiences that digital media practices are now prompting. Where we end is a state in which the familiar distinctions between media and space breakdown and the mere act of living in the world becomes the user interface.