from empathy to cyberspace

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From Em

pathy to CyberspaceA

ndrzej Głow

acki

Specifically, Glowacki targets two main features of a philosophical conception of how the world is structured by our powers, mental and physical. The first concerns the imagination. Focusing on the need for a new sense of our creative imagination for the transformation of our technological environment , Glowacki integrates larger consequences of the growth of technology for our baseline conceptions of time and space. These become fundamentally altered not only by tools and their deve-lopment but also by our insights into, or questions generated by, quantum physics. Our imagination that we bring to the moment, or event , of design and architecture, of art, ought to reflect how our baseline conceptions in theory and philosophy reflect this new framework. The creative projects of design, resting as they did on a now superceded model of physical reality, need recasting. But how? And here is Glowacki’s crucial turn.

Brendan Hogan

ISBN 978-83-64242-06-9

Andrzej Głowacki

From Empathy to CyberspacePart 1: Design Ideas

© Copyright by Andrzej Głowacki 2014

ISBN 978-83-64242-06-9

Dedicated to the Fields of Cyberspace

“global village”, but in an “intelligent network of space” – Gaia.

A new age requires new mythology: new myth, new rituals and new initiation, leading us, human beings, to growth and understanding of our own humanity, collaborating with artificial intelligence and the reality of the binary language. If we are to live forever, as the medicine of future assures us, we shall need transhumanistic houses, allowing leading the life of an eternal traveller. Like Homer’s Odysseus, we will be wandering in the space of cosmos.

Andrzej Głowacki

We are living in the XXI century. Everything has changed but educational standards. Does such a branch as computer design for media and architecture still require supporting it with traditions of the nineteenth century? Are the current approach to design, the philosophy and also the methods of educating future designers justified in the face of landmark civilisation changes, witnessed by us every day?

The basis for economic development is investment in education based on creation, imagination and the ability to think creatively, particularly in abstract concepts. Passion and strength of mind are the future of social growth and development. Knowledge and information have become a “good” of greatest value, requiring care and nurture. The policy of short-sighted benefits needs to be put out to pasture. Education for short-term needs and threatening with the computer destroying art are as groundless as not investing in science and art development. Fear of cyberspace, cybermedicine, intelligent houses, emotional space and thinking objects requires new education. Teaching design is showing of a new philosophy of life’s existence – not in a

Credo

philosophical-fairytale theory maybe also a design one

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First there was zero, or rather a circle with two bulges – as if it had full bellies, for it contained three elements within.

The element of empathy – that is the omnipresent cosmic love, the wonder of creation, construction, building, pure beauty in itself, space so perceptible it is almost tangible. Such multidimensionality of space all-embracing with its wisdom, appearing as pure light. A landscape of light and its decomposition.

The element of annihilation, lying opposite, is the element of low feelings, hatred, jealousy, of pure, beautiful destruction, something to the effect of a cosmic black hole. A land of delusion, illusion, as though a spontaneous presence of a great space devourer, a form of pure darkness appearing as lack of light. A form also called the “light of death” and the “land of added shadows”.

The third element – of nucleus – the cause of all growth, all creation, all that is alive and tends to exist now and here. It is an amazing, wonderful dimension always ready to create. Like an ocean of energy and light, action-ready potential of everything that wants to come into existence and become a so-called full achievement.

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The three elements are in a dynamic balance. Each of them separately is only an element, but together they form the most beautiful and marvellous cosmic act of creation. Some call it: Shiva Dance, others: Opus Mundi of the Great Creator.

Over zero, if we add one in the binary code, we discover first a three-dimensional space, heading for as many as eleven dimensions. There we discover convoluted spaces, Kaluza-Klein ones, lurking, waiting to blossom, waiting for a sunray like lilies, awaiting their time. Everything has here its inborn nature of multidimensional reality. Those spaces are like a gigantic pyramid which curves far in the space of the eleven dimensions and meets a sister pyramid of the land of minus one.

Both head towards the ocean of primary matter, which is beyond the horizon of cosmos, where there are other properties, where everything is possible, for it is not limited by the human mind. There are no specified directions there. There is only this – the cosmic attractor – the cause of all cause, for nothingness bears everything. It is a place without time, the haven of lost galaxies.

If we go below zero, add minus one and start operating with zero-ones, we shall enter the land of matrix, cyberspace, virtual reality, where there are no dimensions, where there are

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no relations as to distance. Here acts will be created to outreach human perception, human thought. We will be able to look at the world differently, not as captive minds anymore. For we will have left everything behind...

Where the two curved spaces meet, it comes to the meeting of all varieties of parallel worlds and crystallising of all emotion, for it is here that the gate to our perception and understanding ends. On the borders, new realities are created again and anew, disappear and emerge, create and annihilate, become – the sum of all changes.

In those two realities, so different, the same dynamic balance of mutual relations creates all beings. The harmony of beings is a world of calm, world of creation – a Theatrum Mundi.

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empathic space

Thanks to empathy the human is able to measure up to their soul, experiencing feelings earlier caused by it. Emotions cause unnamed powers to rise and fall within us, evoke ragged image sequences, nameless sounds from memory, whose arrangements and rhythms result from an individual’s life experiences. A geometry of sensations, feelings and emotion is rooted deeply inside us. The language of geometric and emotional values is a sort of algorithm, an inborn communication method between the human and reality, it is also the language of space – its forms and rhythms. As Vasilyi Kandinsky wrote: The harmony of forms must be based upon a specific affection of the human soul. The sense of geometric order allows the human to interpret spontaneously, it “leads by the hand” not forcing to abandon any “inner obviousness”. It allows to combine strictly defined meanings with signs – read symbols, find pre-images being a manifestation of ourselves, a reduction of our intuition.

Yet one may look further for the source of unity between the human and the world – somewhere beyond geometry, the tunnels of light and dark, which exist in all of us, extending towards infinity...

The idea of emphatic space shows the spiritual partnership between the human and their environment. An archetype of these relations manifests itself through arrangements of blocks and interiors, generating access to multisensual qualities.

The design project of the Rail Square before the Railway Station in Kraków was based on the idea of the four elements. The project task assumed the treatment of the square – an open, public place – as “town interior”. Thanks to “revaluing the values”: changing the point of view and the way of assessing the space’s character, contained within the topic, the square became in the designer’s mind an “inner space”, friendly and close to the human.

The author of one of the solutions, Karolina Niwelińska, created a space in which the human may emotionally identify with the matter. Sensual sensations, arising from contact with the “tissue” of the four elements: water, air, earth and fire, become a means allowing the users and recipients of the emphatic space to co-experience and co-feel the material manifestations of reality. This space is based on a hierarchy – initiation – available for everyone. The order of spatial elements in combination with the simplicity of blocks and interiors allows the recipient to get in contact with energy present in the structures of matter. The effect was achieved by balancing the

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Karolina Niwelińska, 2001

tensions between shapes, colours, items and light – the resulting spatial structure is not accidental, although it was born due to the creator’s gesture, spontaneous delight over the properties of the physical world.

The designed spatial structure is not accidental, whether it was born as a result of the spontaneous delight over the properties of the physical world.

The whole experienced reality set in the field of the

recipient’s individual consciousness - the inner world of the human experience. Filtered through the individual design emotionally and rationally, through the inherent sensitivity and the acquired hierarchy of the values, it is reflected in the thinking and behavior of the individuals and also created its spatial and temporal structure: the quantity and quality of forms, the process of mapping the physical properties, the selection of the mental properties, which generate the created structures.

First because the world does not mean anything, and the author proceeds to tell only...

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As stated by José Ortega y Gusset:

The contradiction between the hierarchy, which truth is believable, and that is believed by the other, is that the acceptance of the latter would be tantamount to consent to the destruction of himself.

So is the empathy at all possible without the need to annihilate ourselves? If the design of the empathetic space –making the compassion – has a sense? If the mass sub-consciousness, enabling us to derive from a common original source of the archetypal wisdom, is a real phenomenon?

Perhaps we fear the empathy in the sense of the annihilation of our individuality?

And if indeed we fear this compassion, does not the creation of empathic space for the survival of the humanity become a spiritual necessity of the twenty-first century?

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Spaces of the Snow Queen as a guide to the inner landscape of our imaginings

Yesterday when I was little, my father read fairytales to me. They opened inside me, like enchanted lands, and my imagination started to bring them out of nothingness, magic worlds reached out for me, and I let them take me away.

Tomorrow, well, maybe a day after, we will take our children to a Fairytale Museum to experience there together with them the stay in the mysterious world of fantasy.

On entering we will get a ticket – chip, which together with our electromagnetic field will be received and processed by hundreds of small computer chips spread throughout the whole architectonic object. They will create for us – the visitors – ever new visualisations dependent on our mood, frame of mind, inner passion.

We shall enter a great hall where we will only see huge columns and stairs submerged in that cosmic abyss of the fairytale world – our movement, way of moving, mood

will cause the palace of the Snow Queen to rise before our eyes. We will see the creation of a new world – one only for us. The interior of the palace will blend with our interior. It will appear before us together with incredible holograms and funny fairytale characters, coming from our imagination, our dreams. We will be engrossed by aesthetic emotion.

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ilustrating with space

Designing, understood by me as illustrating with space, forces the designer to confront words, contents and artistic forms. This confrontation serves to discover networks of corresponding values between the stylistic layer of a text and the formal rule of constructing space. In this way, while designing, I experience the covert structure of phenomena.

The illustrator ceases to be “merely” an architect – the author of spatial structures. His role is significantly more important and responsible, for the structures created by him are to reflect meaning, convey content , speak to the beholder, create a spatial analogy of a literary vision. Architecture – an illustration expresses not only artistic and aesthetic order but becomes a medium of symbolical, metaphorical, archetypal, philosophical and emotional values.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Urszula Krawczyńska, 2005

Is it possible for lamps to levitate in an emphatic space? For colours to match our mood, is it possible for flexible materials on the walls and floors to change, play, flirt with us and adapt to our feelings? A surrounding stuffed with chips communicating with each other, placed in the flexible materials, causing any “reaction of change” which will help us feel as if in a land of fairy tales.

In the Hans Christian Andersen Centre project by Urszula Krawczyńska, presented in the consulate of the Kingdom of Denmark, to celebrate Andersen’s year, the architecture of the museum’s interior ceases to be merely a background for the exhibits. It becomes a live structure, a field of interaction between the human and the “exhibit”. The space becomes an animated interpretation of the subject – the world of fairy tales.

The task of illustrating a world of fairy tales using space forced the author to revaluate values, ponder outside the stereotypical thinking of the static nature of the environment. For the world exists in constant movement thanks to the physical forces that keep it in an equilibrium, and millions

of micromovements performed by physical elements from the tiniest to the largest. Similarly, human life is an axis of cyclic changes that occur in accordance with the biological rhythm. A fairy tale is a story of change. Theorists call its principle of construction a “hero’s journey”. This journey is rather a metaphor of a cycle of maturing by achieving subsequent levels of development, and overcoming barriers. That is why an artistic interpretation of a fairy tale can be a step towards light, a transformation of the primmordial world of darkness. Thus we gain a new perspective, no longer seeing the interior as a place, but an occurrence and a phenomenon. The “interior phenomenon” is endowed with a nature which is fluid, mobile, dynamic and variable.

In the Urszula Krawczyńska’s project the “beholder – recipient” is drawn into the designed reality, becomes a

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part of the fairy tale world of fantasy: variable, irrational, diverse. Offering of a multiplicity of aesthetic, emotional, allegorical stimuli, having its source in Andersen’s fairy tales, is the basic function of a created space. The approach presented here differs from the traditional approach to the issue of function in interior design which discredits the “functional” aspect of feelings and emotions.

The interior of the Museum of Fairy Tales is a feast for the eyes of the beholder, they tempt with the wealth of multi-sensory experience. They offer the possibility of a stroll under a procession of “levitating” lamps or the companionship of a globe that, by moving upwards and downwards, causes various physical phenomenon, that change the whole environment in a flash.

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Color and movement make the human soul shiver. In the surrounding space emotions materialize. Emotions that accompanied the creator, as well as those accompanying the recipient of the designed space.

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Is the world of fairy tales real, genuine? Or perhaps it’s only a pretext for the act of creation of a “fertilizing space”? Can Andersen’s books float through space, or are we enchanted by an illusion? Are we experiencing an illusion of perception or an illusion of a three-dimensional organization of space created for fairytales? Will a change of scale and proportion create an effect of experiencing and living a secret? Is the act of designing a secret creative causality of the space of empathy?

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In an emphatic space a human ceases to be a user and becomes a recipient, moved by the overall image of a created reality enters an expressive world of empathy.

Experience is of most importance.

philosophical literary epic of interior

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3 Urszula Zawadzka, 2000

The interior becomes an epos, a narrator, it tells us its story, it draws us in the ambience, it enchants us with light, mood, texture, if it is designed based upon the magical structure of the script – the tale. The modern man, lost in the influx of information, flooded by the media and “bites of information” is in great need of a Campbell “hero’s journey” – he needs to travel a modern pilgrimage to the sanctuary of artistic space. The space designed based on an initiation scenario creates a need for a new mythology, the need of encountering own fairytales, myths and legends. The dreamy landscape of experiences provokes us to try to find ourselves and our humanity, find our own emphatic space and experiencing the secret.

At the present time architecture becomes an actor. It fulfills a para-theatrical function, as the Gehry’s museum in Bilbao – this permanent spectacle of light, time, space and a pilgrim (?) crowd. A symphony of material designates the places that focus the attention and emotions of the recipients, changing the public space into a private place.

Designing based on a script understood in Campbell terms is a process of forming events and actions, an invention of recording time in the matter of an architectural object’s structures. A script transforms a public space into a theatre of space, causes sensual feelings and a whole spectrum of reflective responses. It affirms us - we say: “look, I was there”, “I touched the myth”, “I crossed the first threshold of initiation”, “I experienced the myth of this place”, “an initiation of an almost mythical place took place inside of me”. The script of a place interferes with our sense of division: into the outer and inner space. Experiencing the tissue of aesthetic tension, we enter contact with the art of creating space. This raises the specific sphere of translation of spatial literary perceptions into a harmony of form.

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We read judging the style, we discover a multi-syllable wealth, and our brain imparts to it motion and mood. Step by step we intuitively escape into a third dimension, we illustrate using space.

The concept of literature in space is balancing between a force of habit and a metaphor of form, it is art and playing with art allowing us a diversity in viewing various climates, based on the mind’s natural tendency to construct conceived images.

The concept of literature in space is also balancing between equilibrium and instability of a literary text’s structure transferred into a three dimensional texture.

space as journey

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Agnieszka Nowińska, 1998

Cafe “Nautilus” is a project inspired by a journey to the centre of the earth, experienced through Jules Verne’s literature. This is how an extraordinary emotional value was assigned to a simple, ordinary function. Taking a journey to the centre of the earth, we descend into a land where we can see unusual objects originating in the writer’s imagination. Those elements transferred into a designing plane become a tangible stimulus for the imagination: the geometry of the planetary system is “merely” a design on the floor; the starry sky is an annexe for one table.

Today it is hard to believe that in 1998 when the presented project originated the academics still frowned upon the computer as a design medium. Today this fact raises eyebrows, however, I remember working on this project with a smile of satisfaction because no matter what tools were used for visualisation, the project became a perfect illustration of my understanding of education as a continuous evolution on the plane of master-pupil relations, happening through dialogue.

A thought links a functional necessity and a creative game, conflict and harmony, plus and minus – links – so that a masterpiece can

arise in the act of design creation.

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Image as an expresion the design reality

Man, from the dawn of history, learned to recognize, create, use images to record the perceived reality. He learned transferring three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane of paper. He created images. What is an image? What is this record – is it only a paradox of visual sensations? Do we live in the environment of visual consumption? Can we live without the mass media, without the emotional processing of everything that surrounds us?

In the 19th century the first magazine „The Gentelmens Magazine”, with a circulation of 20 000 copies, created the first “virtual society” which received the same texts and images at the same time. Then the magazine “L’Illustration” appeared, based on a visual message, showing people new worlds until then unavailable to them. With the magic of images it transported them to the most remote, until then unknown and incomprehensible places. People got to know

the power of the image, its effect of suggestion and strength. They were “transferred” as if into another dimension.

Nowadays most advanced computer programs allow us to really show the unreal reality, to record parallel worlds emerging in our imagination, giving us the possibility of experiencing them three-dimensionally.

Euclidean geometry and discoveries of the Renaissance: bird’s eye and linear perspective give way to the generated three-dimensional projection. Paradoxically, empathy moved or returned to the digital world, to the matrix and cyberspace, where we can experience it in a more realistic, tangible image. We are no longer only recipients of images, we become participants of suggestive information transfer contained in images. We move in the designed reality, actually experiencing it.

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Isn’t this kind of creation a kind of internal absorption by dreams moving us into cyberspace?

All the designs presented in this book are an attempt to record multiple realities using an image – from empathic feeling to cyberspace. Are the recorded images only a graphic emotion? Or are they a philosophical visual fantasy? Or are they perhaps a precise visual statement announcing a new created space?

Spatial art plays a huge role in our culture. Its “capture into an image” is an attempt to show the state of a new reality. Are the “captured images” only a message to realize? Or are they one of the means of design/project experience?

I intend to show my students the role of the creative act – that is drawing, creating, issuing projects, ventures – it is a free, constant motion, the movement of the though and the thinking. When this movement, that is a stimulus, is being visually expressed, it becomes an act of creative design.

The design tool is irrelevant – a crayon or a computer. What really matters is that thanks to the new tools a new vision

of architecture is born (create a new vision of architecture?) – cyber architecture. New spaces and technical abilities are created for its implementation. We think of the transhumanist «home» and as a generation of Odysseus’ children we will become the wanderers of the sky – of the new spaces…

Our eyes, our windows to the world, our images – the reflections of the world, the reflections of our imagination and artistic creation. Once a recording of a clear vision, now – supported by the computer – become living, three-dimentional new realities. They soak up and absorb us, they give new sensations.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Tomasz Toporowicz, 1997

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Tomek Topowicz’s sacral project shows a unity of man and architecture. The departure point of the reflection on the project was the mandala of nine triangles: nine orifices of the body - nine planets of the solar system – number nine in magic is the peak of mental and spiritual development. The organizing principle of this project is the division into three levels corresponding to three levels of consciousness. The first level is available from the “four sides of the world”. Its base is a sheet of glass supported by a series of tendons whose arrangement highlights the location of the object relative to the four directions. This level rises above the ground, visually breaks away from the area where the architectural object is located.

Just as the image of reality is illusory, treading on ground is also an illusion. The horizontal axes of the object: north - south, east – west symbolize an organized real world. The point of their intersection marks the center, the vertical axis running through them indicates the direction of the flow of spiritual energy. The centre of the object is a place of dialogue- of a mutual “penetration” of all three levels of the pyramid, the element introducing cosmological order. The centre is also an

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orientation point, a place situated in time and space – our here and now. It symbolizes a state of grace, a state of mind capable of rising to higher levels of consciousness, a balance between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The second level of the object corresponds to a higher level of consciousness, a higher level of spiritual initiation, a higher level of sensitivity. Two paths lead towards it: the first one is short but steep and dangerous, the second is gentle but long. Both roads have to be experienced in time, both require consideration. We need to become aware of which road we want to take, not only in contemplation, but also in life. The Sacrum object embodies the spiritual transformation of man. It is like a sail stretched between pairs of opposites:

on the horizontal axis: between violence and gentleness, on the vertical axis: between heaven and earth - between what is rational and what is intuitive, between the real and surreal, between craft and creativity. The Sacrum object is to raise the psychic awareness of the human, to lead him along the path of spiritual development towards “spiritual luminosity”.

The third level - the level of the superconscious is not available to ordinary mortals. This level is the top of the pyramid - the divine eye which shows that what is above is also below. No physical passage leads there because it is the highest level of spiritual development. The place where the soul resides.

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Eye as a gift of sight, perception is a symbol of light and the window of the soul. It has the gift of receiving images and sending visions into space. In Christianity, an eye in a triangle symbolizes Divine Providence. Psychoanalysis describes the eye as an organ of consciousness and the so-called third eye is a sign of power and omni-perception. The eye opens the door to space, gives a perspective of a view and insight into what is outside and also what is inside of us. Evil eyes are Medusa and the Basilisk. Fomoraig King had one eye with the power to kill. The effects of the “evil eye” were fought against in a variety of myths and fairy tales. Often stories were told about the” evil eye”. The goddess of Fortune was attributed with blindness just as was justice.

The symbolism of the eye is ambiguous.

During the journey through the Sacred Object, the human being is accompanied by the omnipresence of the eyes - that is, eternal vigilance, sensitivity to the power of evil. The human chooses - observed, trapped, under the watchful eye, he changes his view of the space he occupies. Changing his view of reality, man opens himself to new values , new sensations, new feelings – he gains greater awareness of his existence. He realizes the existence of the road and the space. The existence of what was before him, but is gone, and of what is imperishable, eternal, universal. He realizes the need to choose the path that will lead him to the destination of the journey. As in life, he balances between good and evil, space and lack of it, between what he sees and the illusion of what he wants to see.

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New technology has allowed us to look at the experience of spatial dimension from many angles. We can see the distance measured in light years, only to immediately move into the interior of the physical matter - the distance measured in microns, angstroms or nanometrics. Physical space shows us its new faces when we experience its physicality with a trip to the interior. The Buddhist approach to determining the nature of reality as virtual seems possible by “looking” at the world through the prism of the number. The number shows us the world as a collection of the same objects that are not the same thing. The binary system gave us a visual device to travel “into space.” The space found in the history of art, called “styles” is a history of the development of geometry, a record of Fibonacci numbers, the art of the golden ratio. The development of mathematics and geometry: from Euclidean geometry to alternative models of Riemann, Lobachevsky, fractal geometry, has given us a real insight into the structure of the geometry of nature. Art has shown us that the “copied” world is expressed in many ways: from the Renaissance perspective with one point of intersection to the Cubist perspective- that is, from linear thinking to the simultaneous expression of all of the aspects of space- this creates new opportunities for the unfettered power of imagination. Holistic thinking poses new challenges to design, triggers creativity and the ability to create entirely new values.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Anna Bartman, 2009

In the past they used to ask me venomously: why do you need physics? Epigones’ voice passes unnoticed. The fascination with the world and the ability to shape it in accordance with its spirit comes from the knowledge of the beauty of physics: aspects of both experimental and theoretical harmony of models and hypotheses.

Modern physics is similar to spirituality

I used to say to my students: when you design the space of a house, take into account the shade behind its walls and the sun shining behind them. Now, I would add, try to understand the mystery of the matter located in that shade. To get to know the driving force of every atom of the designed matter and of the created space. To know the beauty of the cosmos and the space awaiting there for them, to let themselves be carried away by their unfettered imagination which lies inside them. To go astray on the wonderful paths of creation. Architronic 4D spatial object is like touching multiple realities and multiple dimensions simultaneously. This new concept of “exploring scientific discoveries”, experiencing it in space, designed in such a way that anyone can touch the hidden dimension of the self. This is not three-dimensional cinema, but

a new, real perception of 4D architecture. Journey into one’s own body, your own tour of leukocytes and erythrocytes, and then further into the size smaller than a millimeter. Object Architronic 4D shows the connection of the macrocosm and the microcosm. The visual sphere of scientific discovery is revealed as illusory, scaled up architectural elements. A magical object is created, carrying us into the world of illusions and hidden dimensions, into the world of art, science, multivariate magic of creation of the binary language.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Dagmara Dela, 2009

the language of physics as a language

of spaceWith great pleasure I indulge myself to travel into the matter of laws of physics, succumbing to the charm of exploring the structure of light and darkness. Experiencing the matter raises in me the desire to see antimatter. In Dagmara Deli’s project, four architectonic objects, as a fundamental laws of physical discoveries, are to show an opportunity to explore the inner-atomic space with their structure. Indeed, it is a spectacle of physics as a study of the structure of consciousness, seeking to convince us that the further division into the so-called living and dead organisms is already a superstition. While awareness is attributed to quantum mechanical processes, architecture breaks any limitations imposed on it a long time ago.

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12 978 189 the hidden structure of the Babel Tower

For someone who looks “from the outside”, numbers and their entanglement is a sheer Babel Tower…

12 978 189 However, this number is exceptional, for it is the greatest known prime number discovered by Edson Smith. A priceless number which guarantees privacy and anonymity for it is the prime numbers which are the basis for coding systems, guarding the security of information circulation in the Web. Our today’s world is a true Babel Tower. Wherever you are, various languages reach your ears, various cultures mix and merge. Our Europe is a Europe in which the walls of borders and divisions have fallen. The only wall which we humans have not been able to cope with for ages is our internal struggle with our own imperfections like is the case with the character in Pink Floyd’s The Wall. We lose in the fight with our own ego, libido and the commerce which is flooding us. Commonly felt is the lack of spirituality, mutual understanding among people, and empathy.

The Tower archetype expresses the idea of pan-Earth. This is Pangaea – the mythical unity, creation of life, movement up- and downwards, but also the symbolical aspiration of humanity to knowing “God’s thought”, to knowing the Absolute, to knowledge about the Universe’s constructions. Looking from above allows to see the curve...

The restructured myth of the Babel Tower shows that we are able to overcome any contradictions, given to us as a lesson in humility, but also reveals the hidden wish of humanity – the wish to escape beyond the magic circle of the already known world assigned to us and the magic circle of time given to us. Reaching the hidden structure of the Babel Tower we learn one another. Our imagination knows no borders or limits, our emotions are free and creative, we create a new world, new dreams, for we need inner freedom for our dreams. Through digital art our life becomes more complete, we build, compose, open new lands inside ourselves and for everyone around.

Every day we struggle with our lives, childhood and adolescence problems and everyday routine. We also struggle with an affluence of side effects of the new digital revolution. This is not Gutenberg Galaxy or the counterculture of the year 1968 anymore. Our everyday life continuously reveals the “confusion of languages so they

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would not understand each other”1. But this sentence from the Book of Genesis loses its meaning when we realise that we are living in a network of numbers which entwine us and which communicate us regardless of time and space.

Forced, we all really use one universal language, and this is not only English, as it may seem at first. That language is the binary system, which we have everywhere. It surrounds us, spies on us, creates its own world and helps to record our memories, our reality and works – it is omnipresent. That is language is the music, the images which we record, create, send – it is the cosmos, which we see from a distance of 13 bn light years, it is the neutrinos, nanometry, the images and awareness unavailable until recently, even unimaginable. Our eyes are looking at a virtual „Babel Tower” reaching from 1025 metres, i.e. 1 billion light years, to 10-9 metres, i.e. 10 angstroms, or 1 nanometre. They are looking, but do they see?

12 978 1891 Paraphrase according to the New International Version (Gen 11,7).

The absolute originality of world perspective imposed by the digit lies in the fact that from digital point of view all objects look the same, but are not the same. This idea by Denis Guedj captures the essence of understanding the modern Babel Tower. It is a record which changes the image of ourselves from year to year. It contains within itself the medicine of an unimaginable future – maybe it is the beginning of immortality? Even today the technique called muscle reinnervation allows to move an artificial arm only with one’s own thoughts. Thanks to works of scientists who are not afraid of their own dreams, such a record turns into artificial intelligence. Will the binary system, construction, number entanglement ever in the literary sense become our guide and stand before us in a humanoid figure of a master, a teacher? Or maybe they are already imperceptibly becoming one?

When I hear that Guillermo Habacuc Vargas considers himself an artist because at the Biennial exhibition Bienart in Corsica he tied a dog to a wall with a rope and tortured it by not feeding or giving anything to drink until the poor animal died before the public’s eyes, I think our world has gone mad. Human humility degenerated and I am ashamed for the biennial organisers, ashamed for the Homo Sapiens species. I am ashamed that killing is regarded as so called art. I am ashamed that showing dead bodies of newborns and human body stripped of skin at the exhibition in Blue

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0 01

001 1000

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City in Warsaw is in turn to be regarded as education. But what is it supposed to teach us? Or is it maybe making “pure” business on death, caused by the misconception that most of us is so emotionally degenerated that we need extreme “thrills” to start thinking?

I am ashamed that today’s art is too often unable to notice the beauty of the harmony of the Universe’s construction, revealed to us every day by modern science. It came to a grand, epoch paradox of humanistic science standing against dehumanised art! As I feel a believer and defender of true art – the one connecting and joining into an inseparable whole natural and humanist sciences, and as an enthusiast of transhumanism, I try to make my projects speak with the language of modern physics and other natural sciences and at the same time still have something of the mysteries of alchemy and philosophy of old times.

Today, for the fun of it and some out of boredom, I record “numeric images” of human culture in a very sparing outline – the greatest and outstanding works, full of mathematical harmony and proportion, hiding the golden ration, based on the Fibonacci numbers. May we not tomorrow be touched by an epidemics of amnesia described in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Marquez, an amnesia caused by our “enslavement and addiction to the digital world”? Who will be the masters of tomorrow? New media and

particularly the Internet, as Professor Gary Small claims, violently accelerate the evolution of our brain. They develop and imperceptibly change our very selves. Scientists from the Karolinska Institutet claim that we can deceive our brain and make our mind “leave” the body and enter another, for example one in virtual worlds. That consist in supplying the brain with constant stimulants for the receptors of various senses to cause the impression of changing bodies.

Is our new Babel Tower not a harbinger of an epoch of Kurzweil’s spiritual machines, from “The Age of Spiritual Machines”? Maybe those machines would communicate better using a language looked upon “from the outside” by most people as a complex sequence bereft of meaning?

Has the era of artificial intelligence and art based on the binary language already begun? Will understanding the fact that we are children of Gaia, also called Pangaea, beings in a “cosmic journey”, residents and simultaneously elementary components of the Milky Way lead us to better understanding of ourselves?

(243112609 – 1)

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– as a medium of information space

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Monika Natkaniec, 2004

the language of informaticsThe museum of technology. The horizontal plane is not just a road leading to the journey’s goal, but also elements of computer code that under the pressure of visitors activates the existence of the architectonical object’s space. Crossing the land of “mechanical illusion”, we experience a constant deception of our perception- from holograms to changing the shape of the visited structure. Willy-nilly, we enter a world of a spatial and virtual game: action - reaction, movement – space. Reality and virtual space merge into one. The man is the culprit and the cause of the existence or non-existence of the museum building.

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– as a medium of information space

the harmony of public space

Public space - unknown, incomprehensible, owned by no one and empty. Generating distance to itself, as we can observe in some cities. Marked by the counterculture, besieged or omitted. Requiring a sense of order or regular arrangement? Having a past and future or just being a chaotic entity of today? A classical language of public architecture- squares, markets, gates and triumphal arches, all this potential of law and order, in which empathy is dictated by the narrative history of events associated with places, genius loci, reveals the beauty and lyricism of the build-up of spirituality of generations. In the past, there was a specific of ritualization of places in public space. Space divided into external and internal, the sacred and the profane hid in it a mystery. Public space had its routes and courtyards leading to the centre, in which was hidden the “contact” of time and space.

Is ritualization of public space possible today, when the pace of life takes a dangerous form, going towards self-destruction?

Man needs space, but his soul is looking for a place that is part of a safe haven in public space. A place in the public space is the axis of spatial tensions and vibrations that occur between the different elements of the structure of the environment. Energy is headed toward the site, towards the centre, where the richness of physical forms gives birth to wealth of spiritual experience. The centre of the public space can be understood as a Hegelian spirit realm.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Magdalena Szyncel, 2008

The geometry of feelings, sensations and emotions is deeply rooted in humans. The moment of experiencing is of utmost importance. The language of geometry and emotional values is a type of an algorithm, a natural method of communication between man and reality, it is also a language of space – its forms and rhythms. Magdalena Szyncel’s project The Temple of Music is an interactive space integrated with human emotions. The aim of the project was to translate the language of two-dimensional graphics into three-dimensional space. The departure point of the project was the album cover of Amon Tobins. Through the transformation, transfiguration and specific three-dimensional collage, a possible course of functions was obtained in public space. Geometric procedures of formation led to the “discovery” of Lorenz’s Attractor, which is a description of chaotic phenomena.

A new algorithm appears of architecture aimed at “breeding” as well as simulating the spatial structure: from the external

landscape created in accordance with the rules of Euclidean geometry to the internal landscape wrenched from the spatio-temporal context. This internal landscape, absorbing the scenery cut out by the construction of the place, gives rise to a liquid, variable form of Trans-Architecture, which is a record of a grammar of shape.

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Dorota Narwojsz, 1999

Designing the sacred - profane is seeking the unity of form with the spirituality of the matter used. The interior space cannot be the same as the outer space. Sacred space is a space that gives the depth of peace and confidence, harmony of contact with the mystery – it is a concept of art as an act of liberation and purification from what introduces chaos into the project and interferes with the order of space. Here, every material form expresses a spectrum of light on the way to enlightenment. In the Dorota Narwojsz’s project the structure of the tree “closes”, shields the sacrum, and protects the sacrum against the profanum, protects us, the faithful inside, it reminds us of the existence of the world tree, whose leaves are the names of all the people. When a leaf falls, the angel of death Azrael reads the name and thus the human soul separates from the body. The form of the tree is a symbol of life, death and resurrection, we realize this thanks to seasons. The tree combines up - the macrocosm and down - microcosm. In Mayan mythology, a tree growing in the center of the world supports the sky.

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A space with an appropriately shaped relationship between the sacred and the profane, a relation linking what is inside with that which is on the outside, provides man with a sense of security. The harmony of the sacred - profane allows us to feel empathy within the sacred. Harmonious sanctified space, creating a feeling of security and at the same time a feeling of being loved teaches us humility of feeling, allows a proper development and growth of the soul.

It allows us to feel the divine here on earth.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Karolina Sorotiuk, 2009

In time we will stop thinking about architecture as something stable and static. The walls will be able to adapt to “take us” into themselves, they will surround our bodies and give us a sense of a safe haven “lifting us into the air.” Digital technology and wireless communication will make the space capable of generating empathy for its tenant. This will give new opportunities to develop a human-friendly environment. We will go through life along the path of selected experiences. As in the pavilion of the senses of Karolina Sorotiuk, we will experience a conscious time travel in the phenomenal space, generating sensory values. The route of 13 flavours and sensations. The cries and whispers of space. Softness and emotions “hidden for later” in the journey into oneself through the ocean of space...

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Piotr Nowokuński, 2005 rok

As a designer and design teacher I search for different aspects of the development of personal space in the interior of the city. I look for hybrid trans-disciplines in creating public spaces and methods of its construction for needs of leisure. I search for new categories for an architecture better suited to the variable human nature. A kind of an intelligent object or structure, sensitive to the signals of the human body, could be called a “ space harmonizing” the needs of the body. A space blessed with the ability to recognize the needs will tune in to us with texture, colour, and image of variable proportions. Wherever we find ourselves we will be surrounded...

…by a dynamic equilibrium.

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Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3 Magdalena Szyncel, 2009 rok

Interactivityas a medium of space

When teaching, I see the designer as a creator who creates opportunities in space for the creative activity of the recipient.

Private or public space becomes a place of designer’s communication structure, it is subject to physical manipulation, responds to speech and body movements, interacts with our mental states. It becomes our partner in dialogue, it becomes an experienced, interactive space. The expansion of the media and its psychological, sociological, cultural effects have been widely described since the “Gutenberg galaxy” as a term already classic or even obsolete. The influence of the media is interesting in shaping the space as well as its evolution. Such an understanding of interactivity shows the art of designing as a game, as a new trend of the evolution of perceiving and sensing space.

We live in the times of change, decay and rebirth, the continuous evolution of the multi-layered civilization and in order to understand it well not only do we need to look through the prism of the present time and the search for the continuity of generations. We need to see the approaching tomorrow, the future of space and of its changing physicality. One of the topics of the exercises that I give to my students is a geometric analysis of a plane and its structure to define and build a place for the purposes of leisure in a public space. The possibility of transforming the structure of space and playing with it by using geometry of alternative models of hyperbolic and spherical geometry creates a new algorithm in the design, giving space a new dimension. A dimension in which the boundaries of privacy and virtuality fade. Interactivity serves man.

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Rafał Fita, 2009 rok

Railway station, a place of awaiting the arrivals and departures, a place of the lost and the lonely, lost in the time of travel, lost in the time of leisure. While designing we want to give people a chance to find themselves, give them the time for involuntary education, time to have fun through science. We create an interactive space - inviting to partnership in space and participation in play, education through light, colour and sound. Colour routes were assigned to particular didactic functions; there we find a place of peace, a place of interaction of light and colour. A theatre of light and shadow was created, places in places, spaces in spaces, constant play caused just by the presence of a waiting man. This approach to public space and spending one’s free time in it releases new layers of consciousness and the pursuit of involuntary growth and maturation. People can, while playing, create new images and their own music, explore the power of their own stories, split light, and learn the rules of the reception of light waves by the eye as the colour. They learn to perceive colour, structure of colour, saturation, just by staying a little out of “boredom” in a well-designed interactive space.

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Justyna Janczuńska, 2009 rok

An optical illusion and delusion as the principle of building a spatial experience. How to bend the space of free time? How to know your own planetary system, its relations and proportions, how to experience space travel while waiting for the arrival of your train and exit it with the conscience of a breakthrough in the way of understanding the world? Designer’s creative thought filled my time, so that I can see myself elevated over everyday life, see the temporal world bathed in a cosmic stream of music and light.

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art of perceiving nodes

Architecture as a conjunction of empathy and cyberspace is a field of searching for hybrid trans-disciplines. By combining the world of communication with the world of imaging, metamorphosis and redefinition occurs within the well-known social and cultural functions. You can see the multidisciplinary efforts within the traditional professions. A journalist takes the role of an information and communication-graphic designer. Scientists unwittingly create brilliant works of art, obtaining images of parallel micro-worlds using research equipment. Physicists are modern mystics telling stories about the origins of the universe and the beginning of the immaterial journey of human civilization in the space of universe. Given the dynamic changes in technology and civilization, to be a designer is to be a visionary, to act creatively, to draw the environment into a game of imagination.

the realityof the game

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A new world created in the era after the birth of the computer has opened a new space for cyberculture, new space of fun, relaxation and stress - computer games. The gap of a new aesthetic experience and experience is being filled and at the same time a new field for scenario architecture is being created, a space where you can freely illustrate the action or interaction of the human of the digital age. A new network community is born – a new open space of the global game- World Craft Online– where each player can create their own maps, soil texture, and texture of the walls. Creating a new reality and participating in it, the players move through the stages of the “new initiations”, experiencing the “power of the new myth” within the meaning of Campbell. In each of the players lies the archetype of “the return of the hero.”

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Rafał Fita, 2010 rok

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Thanks to the new medium which computer games undoubtedly are a new, virtual concept of spatial narrative is born. As Julian Kücklich writes: One of the peculiar qualities of digital games is their ability to project a fictional world, something traditionally ascribed to literary texts. Is architecture created for the purposes of a virtual game a modern space of “immersion” in the mystery of the self-knowledge? Are games the new way of experiencing the awareness of the threshold? Does modern culture, based on data transmission, reinforced by the famous saying from Star Wars – “may the force be with you” - give a new faith and a new collective ritual of the game? As Campbell said in his interview with Moyers – this whole business of life keeps going thanks to killing and devouring - and although it did not relate to the reality of the game, this statement remains valid. Each player conquers the “new dragon” liberating the “forces of life trapped in the subconscious.”

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As we can observe, the cyber culture offers us myths and rituals in a new package. The archetype of separation is invariably present in them- time of return from the virtual adventure world to the real experience as Joseph Campbell describes in the following manner: then there comes a stage when after capturing your own world you need to give it up, this is a crisis of departure, withdrawal from responsibility. The result of this cyclic process of return is a narcotic commitment to re-entering the world of enhanced virtual experiences. But it is a mistake to assume that the threat comes from the “discovery of cyberspace.” The reason lies rather in the natural tendency of the human mind to resort to imaginary worlds. Virtual Games and the way in which they make us interact with the world, cause the birth of a previously unknown form of perceiving space and a new way of participating in it. Architecture created from pixels and binary language is in some way photorealistic but at the same time very abstract, created somewhat outside the traditional rules of Euclidean geometry and the law of gravity. The digital world of this architectural structure shows the features of interactivity allowing the player to interact with space.

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The virtual space is sometimes a carbon copy imposed on reality because through a variety of game consoles we can feel it almost tangibly. We can also move around it in a multi-linear way. Our senses allow us a realistic interpretation of the unreal phenomena at both physical and emotional plane. Emotions that arise as a result of fictional experience are as strong as those experienced under the influence of the actual stimulus, and are just as highly memorable. Thus the game is a cross between wakefulness and sleep. Perhaps in the future a new stage of human existence will emerge, existing in two realities at once. From my perspective, the era of cyber culture has one big disadvantage similar to democracy: the majority which is generally always wrong dictates their convictions and mediocrity to the minority, which as shown in the history of mankind, is the driving force behind the development. That is why it is so important to signal the need for teaching the digital world to the future designers so that they will be able to properly utilize and direct the potential of games and virtual worlds - the place of birth of a new myth.

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We are used to the space, in which we immerse three-dimensionally on the everyday basis, but having created a binary language we immerse more and more in the double reality – known also as a cyberspace. We experience the real, physical space, as well as the cyberspace, located outside the physical side of the geography, where we settled our spaces of information, communication and our virtual multiverses.

This specific land of the «electropolis» or the «Cyber’ cardboard» moves the imagination of design and creates vast field for designing a pace somewhere in the new cosmos. The place without the restrictions and gravity, it gives a chance to realize the vision of the levitating cities, the mobility space of transhumanistic houses and their travelers. I’m not interested in the discussing the phenomenon of the artificial reality and its consequences or the debating the risks, hidden in the games of a «Second Life» kind, and the places and the customs of the real world being awkwardly transferred there. The reality of my life gives me enough good things of beauty now and here.

I would like to focus on the new vision of humanity that gives us ingrowth of mind in the cyberspace. The

The concept of cyberspacevirtuality should not be seen only in the context of its temporal features. Neither should it be used only for the simple purposes: the communication, the marketing, the information transmition and manipulation. Well-focused «cybereducation» can be used for the intellectual and spiritual development, for sensitizing us, healing mind and body, improving our psychophysical and parapsychological abilities.

The impact of cyberspace changes not only our way of being, but also our views on the reality. We see ourselves as the travelers of the hyperinformational cosmos, we allow getting us caught up in the hidden mechanisms, codes of the space, implanted in the images.

For me, as a teacher and a designer, these aspects of the alternative reality are important; they allow the non-traditional teaching, the non-linear thinking about the environment and the world.

Succumbing to the illusory materialization of the ideas, we saturate our own imaginations. Thanks to modern tools of the «virtual materialization» of the multiverses, we move more and more freely in the holistic land of a mind, using the richness of the associative imagination. Our memory

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is constantly stimulated by the visual impulses coming from our media surrounding; it is evolving towards a bold vision of a world without the restrictions in the field of the language, behavior and structure.

A soil of a modern mind that is a prone surrendering by temptations of the «apparent reality», or rather the «apparent non-reality» is a great field for the exploitation of the exercises included in my own teaching program. They are based on the transformation of the space and a collage approach to the constructing harmony of the geometry.

I believe that teaching, based on multi-threading of the text and the space, the instructiveness of the media, the wireless communication and the cyberspace, gives the great opportunities for the «life of new forms» of creation. I’m interested in exploring with the students the phenomenon of the liquid architecture, the creation of the architectural objects, being dynamic, the ever-changing organisms, devoid of the foundation, and the creative act formatting the morphological structures, endowed with their own emotionality. I’m interested in creating The transarchitecture and The metaarchitecture, which are the field of the digital media interaction with the architecture.

New «architectural objects» will bother us with chatting, ask riddles. «How to get into my interior to experience the Jonah myth?» They will be like the big toys, the coquettes - variable, saturated with the artificial intelligence. They will

become our partners in meeting the desires of the leisure time. Saturated with the diodes “elevations” - screens, if they wish, will get the look of the environment and disappear from our sight, they will become a part of the environment or nature. The reality mixed with the virtual space in the moving objects will soon be disclosed to our eyes. I call this phenomenon «the moving architecture».

Our thoughts will become a part of the dialogue and projection. Imagine that in the morning the object gives the impression of the overgrown with the wild grass and in the evening – of the floating in the clouds.

My house is my imagination.

I woke up, I do not know what time it is, so I ask out loud, and the house answers with the image of a timer. Garbage problem is solved. What are annihilators for, the automated waste-sorters, a kind of game of throwing and disappearing?

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A new vision of a house, a boat, a traveler, a ship, cosmos. All in one habitation, in one “shell” that gives the shelter. It is what gives me the warmth and ensures the safety during my journey through the earthly steppes.

Being melted into the technology and the artificial intelligence, we leave Gaia, we become the time and space travelers. Our new homes - ships will be with us in a dialogue. These intelligent structures will - as the transformers - develop and process.

My “spiritual home - structure” will be self-teaching, developing, processing and getting the energy for its own needs. Saturated by the sensors, the microprocessor technology and the nanotechnology, which nowadays allows building technical objects at the atomic level. Equipped with the intelligent environment, we will be walking the way to our immortality. We’ll leave the earth, the galaxy, and we will go by “the spiritual machine-home” on a journey. We will pay tribute to “the time vehicle” of Thornea, and in a sense of the idealized space of Charles Misner - our room will become the entire universe. Moving through the cosmos, we’ll saturate the whole galaxy by our intelligence and spirituality of our machines-houses.

Saturated by breath of Ka’s life, taking a journey through the Nut /Sky/, which gives birth to the sun, and its rays illuminate the horizon, Hathor / Love & Life /, I’m going to reach sometime the Absolute, the Mother of the universe. And she is a frame, that limits the world, “space, time and causativeness” – a cosmic egg shell.

The Transhumanistic HouseI swam into the expanse of the dry ocean,

The cart is wallowing in green and wading like a boat,A mid waves of rustling meadow, among the flowers of flood,

I’m avoiding coral islands of weeds.

Adam Mickiewicz, The Steps of Akerman

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Rafał Fita, 2008

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What does it mean: to levitate?

- Do houses, or rather new architectural objects, must have a door? - asked the small letter m.

- It’s enough to just teleport inside, fulfilling one’s wishes relating time and space, which one chooses - cheerfully replied large and unruly a, the beginning of the alphabet.

- Will the problem of the transport and wasted energy disappear? Is it the literary epos or the nearest future? Will “the home” become our prison or an oasis of the peace and freedom? - asked indocile m.

- Our home will be our doctor, measuring our blood pressure, controlling weight and our diet, reading to us the favorite literature, fulfilling our wishes in friend or girlfriend ... – yawned a, looking for the future, which beginning it was waiting for.

- And what does it mean: to levitate? – m could not calm down, seeking an outlet for its curiosity, but a only smiled.

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Gaia Intelligent Net-Space

Gaia intelligent space net is a vision of the structure ba-sed on the fractal theory of chaos. The vision of the expanding cosmic city. Its system is a combination of the „line” of the in-frastructure and the „spheres of life” - a symbol of the fullness and perfection. The lively structure has no beginning, no end. In the future, it will enlace the earth - Gaia, in order to spread later to the entire Universe. This way, homes, neighborhoods, cities will be formed.

The levitating objects that travel outside of time and gravity, is it possible? Is the spa-ce around us going to become flexible? Is the architecture going to be more organic, based on the freedom to grow and to deve-lop? Going to dance around us?

The levitating cities...

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Marika Wato, 2011

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I believe, that with the continued decline of the Y chromosome a human will change, the gender divisions will disappear, the new man will be celebrating the mysteria virtualia; the mysterious ritual telling that once men and women lived on the earth, leading to a conflict of misunderstanding. They lived in the houses with strong foundations and walls up to one meter thick, they built buildings, which bond them and addict to themselves, but they still lived in a world of the empathy…

The prehistoric men were chasing material goods, loosing the original spirituality. Greed, envy and lust for power led to the genetic changes. Lost in the nature, lost in the motion, they created a virtual space intelligence and united with it.

So it was.

As new people, we celebrate our own mysteria virtualia to celebrate the act of the union of the empathy with the cyberspace. We discover the power of myth and the geometry of narration through the ritual, the new coniuntio of the cybercosmos.

We recall Pierpaolo Petruzziellego, who was the first of the men to undergo connecting his nerves to the electrodes that controlled the electronic prosthesis. We recall the runner Oscar Pistoriu and the model Aimee Mullins, who initiated a new generation of the man-machine integration. We recall the first sensory prosthesis - responsive to touch, heat and cold, as well as the breakthrough that made it no longer possible to distinguish a handshake of the artificial hand from the natural one.

We do honor our smart clothes, that changes the model and style, heating those who dreams, the clothes with GPS, the lacquers sprayed on the body, forming layers on fabric on it, the fabrics that monitor the health and heal us... The Cyberdoctors, The RadiologyWiki, The WikiSurgary, the operating rooms full of robots, the genetic testing, the vaccines for a lifestyle.

And this is just the beginning of our misteria...

Full integration of man and machine has brought us live in the houses, traveling on the water and in the fire, in the

misteria virtualia

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wandering houses, the eternal travelers, Odyseuses, here and there in the cyberspace.

Half man - half machine fears of wars in the cyberspace, the destructions of civilian information infrastructure, a quiet war with a global enemy whose being lost its physicality. The war waged in the binary language, the logic bombs and the digital bombs, which replaced those old – the nuclear ones. Hidden botnets are waiting for the day and the password.

Today during misterium of my mental time travel, thanks to the geometry of narrative, I see things at the junction of the empathy and the cyberworld, based on the fractal geometry. I treat time and space as a tread and a warp. I weave them, taking into account the time dilation. I use the replicators to duplicate the actors of misterium. I give them the teleports and let them move freely in the spaces of time. Our theatrum uses the relativity of time, creating a three-dimensional spectacle of the reality misterium based on the cyberspace. The Kurzweil Singularity Era is coming according to the law of the accelerating development.

Welcome to the misteria virtualia...

Long ago, in that time when the people lived on the heaven devided into men and women, there were perfect pomegranate tree, the cosmic tree, on the eve of the multi-dimensional maze. It was guarded by the snake, who, lured by the aroma of the forbidden fruit, have eaten it turning into a space architecture. In such a way the architecture of life tree was born and its four attributes, commonly referred to as Gadulators, roamed the earth around and told the mysteries of myth of the tree of life in the form, which hid in parallel universes. The structure of the tree was weaved of the thread of time, the thread of space, the thread of light and darkness.

The architectural object, that never served to human, existed in a mind out of time, its interior was outside, its matter was a continuum of awareness of our creation.

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Magdalena Szyncel, 2010

Thesis: the architecture must evolve

Will the architecture, that will move its function from the inside to the outside, really rise? Will it become a fill of the void; will it be a show on the outside, because the entire interior will be the surface of its elevation? Will entire function become the plane of the elevation, and the very solid – the structure, living, smooth and variable?

Will it, like a film work, become an object, implementing an artist script, partially revived body that sympathizes by its artificial intelligence to him - the man of tomorrow?

The time of new space will become biomorphic and revived, or will it fly away?

These questions and dozens of others I present in the releases of my Studia3 - sketches and closed dreams based on discussion and collaboration with students, experiencing their adventures with humanizing the space around us. Projects full of fantasy and dreams, sometimes very real, ready for their time.

archibionics

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Marika Wato, 2010

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initially it was ita usual huge grasshopper

when the black sun shone for the first timethe pervasive darkness revealed itself

He the grasshopper an architect awoketo take visible form and shape

of thirst of sleep era it drank all the water in the worldtherefore it moved its powerful body

in search of the moon man

who revives those who are asleep and gives them a sense

only the moon manis able to revive all the silver statues

of one-winged angels

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making air dense under their feetso they could live again

the moon man can fly like a birdand each revived person condensed ground of hands

making the new world it was a hidden world having something of its own

once called a tjurunga of grasshopperonly through the ritual and initiation in the inside of the grasshopper

one can become a completed man

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Is contact of art, technology and media just a digital theatre of еру new multimedia transformation of the XXI century?

Is the neuroimaging the beginning of a new reality of con-trol over the world of the digital space with ahelp of our thoughts? If so, than what direction will the design of the architectural space chose?

Will the game become the real world of our imagination, will the modification of the cyber-kinetic space lead us into a new dimension of the real time, will the world, during such a rapid development of The Bionics, The Biomimetic, The Biomimicry, The Bionic engineering, the new materials and technology, «be created» with the help of «our thoughts», will the idea of the digital Demiurge creator materialize?

The bionic skeletons, the natural self-sufficient structures will materialize the grasshopper, the architect, a defender of weak, the lost man. Can a man move the principle building living organisms to the space around him and create an ar-chitecture based on the digital automation, the biohydraulic construction constantly supporting a man of the XXI cen-tury? Will the living architecture be only the game of our imagination or our new «house» of the entertainment?

I believe that it all will become possible and real.

Is the reality three-dimensional or multi-dimensional?

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The creative education of young people for the needs of the opened world and еру fulfillment of dreams, that seem to be a fairytale, make the life to take the new di-mension. I believe that it is better to make mistakes than to close ourselves in the real, prevalent world. We have to go beyond our own limitations, to experience what is intangible, because there is nothing that cannot be achieved. If we dream about it, create it mentally, continuously enchanting with your imagination, it will be as real as the digital world around us.

Andrzej Głowacki STUDIO 3Marika Wato, 2011 rok

I see no further need for the architectural objects to stick in one place. Thanks to antigravitators we are going to float in the air. Our hanging gardens, paradise trees will always be with us. The experiencing paradise will become something obvi-ous. The concept of the space and its structure will change not only in designing, but also in experiencing. Will we get to interact with the living architectural organism? What will be the new hierarchy and the symbolism of the space like? What will be its new sensuality like?

The dynamics of the spatial phenomena I call the narrative geometry of the unlimited imagination that once will allow to fully connect the space of the empathy with the cyberspace.

134

Wonky moving beyond structure

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Wonky moving beyond structure

w o n k y : crazy, uneven, incoherent; something of shaken structure

No one yet fully understands the essence of this definition, but cer-tainly few facts can be noted, that help to identify the “wonky” objects.

Wonky is a smooth synergy, combination of the new way of think-ing while deliberately deep reaping from the knowledge and expe-riences of the past; it is an attempt to the smooth humanization of the machine, bringing the human spirit (and thus at the same time bringing the biological element of chaos) to the digital world of the perfect matrix.

Commentary

Brendan Hogan PhD

Arts and Science Liberal StudiesNew York University

The question of technology and its role in human life has been fruitfully and energetically debated by theorists since long before Heidegger’s pessimistic essay by that same title.1 Rousseau famously, for instance, answered the question of science’s role in human progress with a thoroughgoing negative evaluation, launching his career.2 Technological pessimists abound today, as our technical power outruns our ability to apply it in ways that are sufficiently infused with democratic procedures and human values. In short, our tools often end up using us and directing our paths in life, as much as we invent them for some prior human purpose.

1 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper) 1993. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of the Arts and Sciences” in The Basic Political Writings, Translated and Edited by Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett) 1987.

It is evident, however, that our tools, barring, or until, a huge global catastrophe, will be with us for the foreseeable future. They will be a constitutive element of our environment, and thus our possibilities for human growth and flourishing. The question of technology, then, when one accepts this pragmatic premise, is not to be addressed in terms of an existential crisis as to whether to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a technologically mediated environment in the name of some more pure and authentic experience. Nor are we to embrace what technological research and development brings, regardless of any other non-techinical criteria by which we might judge it. Rather, in accepting the technological infrastructure of our lifeworld, we overcome this opposition set up for us by such thinkers as Rousseau, Heidegger, and more recently, Habermas.3 It is the space where the technological and the human interface, and interpenetrate, that Glowacki wants humans to embrace and inhabit. His particular entrée into this question is the practice of design, architecture, and very importantly the pedagogy of these practices. The importance of the latter is testified to by the inclusion of student works from his studio.

In invoking the western philosophical tradition and its reaction to technology, I am aware that much of modern architecture and design theory is philosophically informed. For some, too much so. I am also aware of philosophers such as Donna Haraway trying to think through human and cyborg futures4. However, I mention these thinkers and the philosophical context not so much to frame an interpretation of From Empathy to Cyberspace but as a propaedeutic for encountering the vision of Andrzej Glowacki.

3 Jurgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’” in Towards a Rational Society. (Boston: Beacon) 1970.4 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge) 2004.

Glowacki is situated at an academic, practical, artistic, and cosmic crossroads. It is his experience in teaching art and design for decades that lends to the vision in these pages their pedagogical elements. At certain points along the journey of this text, the reader is invited to work out some of the concepts from the position of design, incorporating technology and creativity. Far from being a workbook, however, the text grapples with articulating an entirely new imaginary given our specific location in the second decade of the twenty-first century. By ‘imaginary’ I mean something like the inherited conceptual community that linguistic beings inhabit and through which they realize possibilities. The ‘imaginary’ is a popular term of art in the social sciences, at least since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, but it has been enlisted to refer to the social and collective imagination that individuals live through, through which they articulate and understand their possible futures and how to interpret their world.5 It is clear that this text is directed at reconstructing and extending our imaginary as designers, thinkers, and members of the human race.

Specifically, Glowacki targets two main features of a philosophical conception of how the world is structured by our powers, mental and physical.

The first concerns the imagination. Focusing on the need for a new sense of our creative imagination for the transformation of our technological environment , Glowacki integrates larger consequences of the growth of technology for our baseline conceptions of time and space. These become fundamentally altered not only by tools and their development but also by our insights into, or questions generated by, quantum physics. Our imagination that

5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. ( New York: Verso) 1983.

we bring to the moment, or event , of design and architecture, of art, ought to reflect how our baseline conceptions in theory and philosophy reflect this new framework. The creative projects of design, resting as they did on a now superceded model of physical reality, need recasting. But how? And here is Glowacki’s crucial turn.

The changes in our technological capabilities and our knowledge of the fundamental laws of nature require a rethinking of how we inhabit our creations, and how they will inevitably become much more responsive to us. So yes, by all means, let our imaginations have as the material for their creation the results of these new modes of thinking. Let our imaginations be shaped in terms of how these new modes radically alter our perception of what is possible, and also in how they represent and make continuous the harmonies of the natural universe discovered in the past and still present in our environment, both organic and inorganic, material and conceptual, empirical and mathematical. But let us pause to recognize just where we sit: on the precipice of an entirely unforeseeable future where the technical and the human so intertwine as to overcome their very distinction. We now occupy aspace where the fundamentally structuring parameters of imagination, traditionally conceived space and time, are being reconstructed.

Glowacki combines reflections on this particular stage in the progress of human technology, philosophical tenets regarding the symmetries underlying all organized phenomena, and the resulting matrix of possibility of the creative organism we humans are. But now we are in a new phase, and the power of imagination that must be integrated is a particularly human power. The power of empathy. The power of empathy is the sine qua non of humanity according to many theories of human nature, including Rousseau mentioned above. But the imaginative capability that allows one to see another and then to see one’s self AS that other, that capacity is where human imagination steps into the emotional, social , and ethical realm. Glowacki invokes cyberempathy as the integration of our built environments

with our emotional and mental lives. Responsive architecture shifting with different signal readings of the agents inhabiting it, for instance, is just one example of how far we must think, according to Glowacki, if we are to cultivate intelligent possibilities give our technological power. It is the power of empathy that Glowacki seeks to extend and integrate in our built environment, to insure that it is fully human, while expanding our conception of the ‘human’ as well. It is this relation, blending, and integration of the human and the natural, the human and the artificial that this text seeks to encourage by challenging, and by provoking, the reader to stretch their imaginations to fund our creativity with the oncoming reality of cyberempathy.

Brendan Hogan

New York City30.08.2014

Illustrations

s. 3 Andrzej Głowacki, Marika Wato (based on graphic work by Tomasz Toporowicz)s. 6-12 Karolina Niwelińska, 2001 s. 14 Urszula Krawczyńska, 2003s. 19-25 Urszula Krawczyńska, 2005s. 26-33 Urszula Zawadzka, 2000 s. 35-41 Agnieszka Nowińska, 1998s. 44-45 Marika Wato, 2011s. 48-52 Tomasz Toporowicz, 1997 s. 55 Andrzej Głowacki, 2010s. 56-57 Anna Bartman, 2009 s. 58-63 Dagmara Dela, 2009s. 68-69 Monika Natkaniec, 2004 s. 72-75 Magdalena Szyncel, 2008s. 76-79 Dorota Narwojsz, 1999 s. 80 Karolina Sorotiuk, 2009

s. 81 Piotr Nowokuński, 2005 s. 83-84 Magdalena Szyncel, 2005 s. 85 Rafał Fita, 2009 s. 86-87 Justyna Janczuńska, 2009 s. 90-91 Marika Wato, 2010 s. 94-99 Rafał Fita, 2010 s. 102 Rafał Fita, 2010 s. 106-107 Rafał Fita, 2010 roks. 108-111 proj. Marika Wato, fot. Andrzej Głowackis. 113 Marika Wato s. 116-119 Magdalena Szyncel, 2010 s. 120-127 Marika Wato, 2010 s. 128-133 Marika Wato, 2011 s. 144 Andrzej Głowacki, 2010

All the design works presented in this book were prepared by students of Andrzej Głowacki’s The Tird Interior Design Studio at Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow 1994-2011.

144

1993-1996Jo Design Gallery

designed by Andrzej Głowacki

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AndrzejGłowacki

Andrzej GłowackiFrom Empathy to Cyberspace

© Copyright by Andrzej Glowacki 2014

ISBN 978-83-64242-06-9

Kokazone PublishingKrakow 2014

Designed by: Marika Wato

www.kokazone.com

Cover design based on graphic works by:Tomasz Toporowicz (front cover)Marika Wato (back cover)

Affiliated to:Instytut Komunikacji Wizualnej i Sztuki CyfrowejWyższa Szkoła Informatyki i Zarządzania z siedzibą w Rzeszowie

from empathy to cyberspace

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