SYNWORLD playwork:hyperspace
27th to 31st May 1999
http://synworld.t0.or.at
Museumsquartier
Vienna, Austria

Exhibition
Symposium
Events

SYNWORLD is an interactive exhibition which invites the public to
discover, explore and play with the newest virtual game worlds and
simulations in art, science, industry and electronic entertainment.

SYNWORLD showcases 3D applications from well-known artists and game
developers, and interactive visual representations from architecture,
medicine and industry.

SYNWORLD opens new playful possibilities to interactive learning
environments with an emphasis on the artistic approach towards
hypermedia worlds and participative virtual environments.

SYNWORLD offers a comprehensive program with lectures, installations,
multimedia presentations and games stations.

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SYNWORLD

Synthetic worlds are a key concept of contemporary infonautics. A broad
spectrum of scientific disciplines is located at this interface of
computer simulation and the visualization of information in dataspace.
Especially those research areas concerned with the game theory, where
complex worlds are outlined by game rules, play an increasingly
significant role, but also the functions of art and culture are of
primary interest. 1) Learning while playing and productive work as a
game are developments that are gaining significance in media hybrids. A
multimedia future of digital expert systems and knowledge databases will
change teaching and learning and also the working process. Will
post-industrial society suffer the computer game recreational shock? 2)
Hopefully, the dark millenium of "work makes free" has come to an end,
and it seems high time to free work from its inhuman context and to do
justice to a new significance of recreation time and employment. In
recent history, the game age seems to have set in. A president, who in
the 80s went into raptures about training American youngsters with video
games to become perfect fighter pilots, was permitted to experience how
in the 90s war itself was turned into a video game. This was, however,
no clean "telesurgery" but a bloody war employing so-called mass
destruction weapons.

Scientific and military research is focusing on the creation of virtual
worlds and the realistic simulation of complex, dynamic, and
multi-dimensional space and processes, thus further gaining economic
significance. The interaction with complex technical systems (the
intern. space stations for instance) or complex data in many cases
requires leaving the 2-dimensional on-screen user instruction or menus
behind to navigate in spatial structures. Today, through the mass
production of powerful multimedia computers for a broad market, many
results of this research and development can be found in generally
available user programs.

Progressively, the creation of unknown galaxies, which no human has ever
entered before, has become easier. These developments have become
apparent especially in the field of home entertainment and in the
computer game industry.

With growing success, simulation is being employed for exploring real
contexts, from material research to cosmology. Although we are
approaching the simulation of reality by means of technical media, we
seem to be distancing ourselves all the more from a homogenous
perception of reality. The multiple realities of non-linear games and
hypertextual narrative structures of digital space and electronic
poliversities are preparing us for the simultaneous existence of
different levels of reality. Software not only makes our world smaller
by drawing us closer together but it also seems to be making it
"softer". The representation of the world is a system of game rules and
symbols for codified perception. The more reference points this system
offers (thus becoming more useful), the more risk factors seep in…
This means that what we are "sure" about is not real after all. Theory
determines observation and humans inevitably perceive the complex world
through limited means. Thus the foundations of understanding are based
on the misunderstanding of the comprehensive world around us.

It has become more difficult for us to know whether objects actually
exist and can be distinguished from the remaining world in any way,
especially after having realized that space and time are relative to our
perception. Frequently, even the limits between a real and a very
life-like and distinct imaginary experience are blurred. The human
nervous system adjusts itself according to what it considers real - this
peculiarity is the basis for many psychological mnemonic phenomena. (ARS
Memoria).

Dead Hollywood stars live longer - ever since they have been digitized
to become virtual actors and their motion have been captured. The
designer pop star has been translated into electronic space and numerous
virtual TV hosts and kids' idols made of bits and pixels (Date Kyoko,
Lara Croft, Sonic Hedgehog) are soliciting the attention of mediated
society. The mimetic gesture of pure information bodies in telepresent
infectious postures offer social standing and positions. The
bio-cultural game rules of social reality are becoming ever more complex
and abstract due to mediation. A "special affects" industry is being
engrammically inscribed into collective unconscious; just as viral
genetic information has surreptitiously entered into the human genotype,
the human being is becoming its own double. Bionic WoMen in cognitive
homeostasis (self-regulation), psycho-cybernetic game figures with
aim-seeking servomechanisms, on the stage that mean the world to them,
cloned from the triplets of trivial media. (Do androids dream of
electric sheep?)

Economic change, in which growth is based on the propagation of
information instead of industrial goods production, is transmuting into
a virtual economy, where the course of the money economy's fever curve
relies less on real production values than on self-referential cycles of
dematerialized game rules in electronic channels. The continued
instantisation of media to hypermedia is pursuing the trend of
multimedia and broadband usage of data networks and we must brace
ourselves for the compression to the gravitational collapse of a black
hole whose pyschosocial aftermath holds surprises in store for us: on
the way to global self-fulfilling media, the data demons in virtual
environments are turning into emancipated knowbots. On the silicon
planet, the "deus ex machina" is producing the "ghost in the machine" in
medial logorhythm. What role can art play in this age of biocybernetic
self-reproducibility?

The human is a symbol-controlled organism, and complex systems or
organisms are on the lookout for entertainment, young computer game
enthusiasts are just one example. From this perspective, it seems
meaningful to ask for the entertainment value and dramaturgy of
technical systems and the structures of our wold. The rare accidents,
coincidences, and improbabilities in media production are then explained
by the necessities defining action. Contextuality, the mother of all
postmodern perplexity, is being obliterated by hypercontextuality
associated with the growing certainty that everything is somehow
interconnected.

The design, and architecture of information also has deep implications
on social politics. The dramatic acceleration in the flow of persuasive
communication transports not only entertainment and information but also
standards of behavior. If information flows faster than most people can
take, then perspectival filtering and structural selection increasingly
play a role in the creation of social reality.

Representation systems and images of the world as a simulation of
reality are efficient inductors and thus astonishingly high costs are
put up with. The depiction of the world has always been a political
instrument and the distortions, as produced by the projection of
multi-dimensional space onto planes, has been well exploited in this
context ( maps as an abstract view of the world itself but also of those
who are drawing them.)

Reducing complex multi-dimensional structures, not simply the projection
of a sphere onto a surface, inevitably creates ambivalences and
distortions, or a subjectivation of depiction. The perspectival loss of
the setting not only leads to a shift in the relation of sizes and forms
but also to visual oscillating effects as the ones that occur during
optical illusions.

A standardized perspective prevents in-depth perception and the
reassessment of relational dimensions. For this reason, humans, in the
ideal case, have at least two eyes and two ears. A restricted and
pre-determined perspective enables numerous special-effect illusions,
similar to those used in feature films and the creation of "necessary
illusions" in the social collective.

For visualization and information architecture, which functions with
dynamic complexity, the expansion of Euclidean space into the field of
hyper-dimensionality, the supposition that more than 3 dimensions exist,
has become necessary. An example thereof is the architecture of super
computers, which would be impossible without a multi-dimensional
hypercube. Not only up and down, left and right were suggested for
hyperspace, but also ana and kata as additional spatial differentiation.

A new dimension of digital space is evolving in software-generated
architectural structures, intelligent software environments, and in the
algorithmic spawning of the software itself. Adaptive virtual
environments have a special status in this context. Hopefully, there
will be enough open systems to enable such dynamic information
environments to express a unique culture of their own. Likewise, the
limits of representation have become clearer by employing simulation
systems. Tools that enable us to use limitations for the redefinition of
possibilities and to reveal new, undreamed degrees of freedom, which
were not included in the original semantics.

The fascination for role games and their transcendence using virtual
actors may not only allow for a more differentiated understanding of
gender stereotypes but also help transpersonal and inter-subjective
qualities to move into the foreground.

Konrad Becker

1) In the field of artificial life and expert systems, artificial
intelligence and operations research, visualization technologies and
computer graphics, mathematics and physics, politics and economic
theory, behavior and conflict research, psychology and sociology,
chemistry and evolutionary biology.

2) Computer simulations for iterative and territorial forms of the
prisoner dilemma can show, for instance, how cooperation strategies
succeed even if deceit promises the biggest benefit in the short run.