Kendal-project proposal

BUREAU OF FORGOTTEN PLATFORMS

Editable Pad :
https://pad.xpub.nl/p/klbprojectproposal

What do you want to make?

An architectural office installation that uses methods of community outreach and software evangelicalism to convert abandoned spaces online into spaces of play and expression. The office will showcase a range of projects (virtual worlds - habbo hotel, social networks - space hey & your world of text) that aim to breathe life and cultivate purpose for these spaces. With the help of these various community projects (spacehey, YWoT), I aim to drive enthusiasm and create new audiences as ways to escape the perils of a much more standardised internet landscape. I am planning to build a physical office installation and website that both showcases the spaces, and explains what these early iterations of virtual worlds offer in a creative context to form small publishing moments.

With standardisation and a push for categorisation of the internet, the online landscape has shifted from freeform hangouts to deliberate spaces that house very specific scenarios, for example, hyperrealistic virtual worlds, and massively surveilled social networks. Categorisation of space, people, events and ideas blocks access to things that might fall out of these specific criteria and proceed to be left abandoned and unused. Early fringe virtual communities on platforms such as Second Life, MySpace and Habbo Hotel were pushed out in favour of walled gardens like Facebook & Twitter. The digital spaces reflect a form of a non-place, created with the idea of what the internet could be in the future. Instead these worlds were abandoned and serve only now as a snapshot of the past, still online but vastly under-occupied.

Take a physical non-place like a mall. These spaces were created as a utopic glimpse into the future and now lay silent and dated, completely a product of the past. How can we activate these digital equivalents as space for creative experiments and making? If we can occupy these spaces as temporary autonomous zones, can we breathe life into the disused? Are their ways to play with the concept of ownership in the online landscape? These are all questions I aim to explore in this project.

Planning

December & January
Research and gather the userspaces and affordances of each virtual world I plan to present. This would involve locating and linking up with these communities online to understand the driving force of preservation of these spaces.

January & February
Create tests with the communities and prototype ways of inhabiting space on these platforms. This will also be the time in which I invite artists to intervene in these spaces and collect results.

March
Building the website and office environment using input from architectural examples. Also, ask for input from the audience. Start sketching the final design of the installation.

May
Finally I need to gather the building materials and office supplies to build the complete office installation including a store front. This would be imperative for introducing the alternative way of using the internet to the public.

Why do you want to make it?

I want to chart the effect standardisation and categorisation has on the creative 'worlds' of the internet. I want to understand the shift between these highly imaginative and creative spaces of my childhood and the hyperrealistic virtual environments of today. Former platforms now feel like digital non-spaces, utopian ideas for a potential future, left abandoned. My project would be a way to explore the potentialities of these spaces and suggest an alternative future for the forgotten. It is both a collective imagining and a collective action that I want to explore, can we bring back a creative community online? The goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but to cultivate these spaces we already have online and give new life to them. It is an exploration into reflective and restorative nostalgia and how these this frames the need to revisit these spaces.

With an interest in Net-Art, I want to explore the possibility of using these forgotten spaces as a medium, while making use of what already exists rather than creating new instances in a bid to encourage sustainability within platforms. I want to make visible these unintentionally underground areas of the internet as an alternative to the options we have in our current online landscape. My final exploration would be understanding ownership in the virtual world, how do EULA's control the output and constraints within these spaces?

Who can help you and how?

Alicia Framis (AMS) - Simulation as a method to present ideas, over-categorisation, architecture
Michael & Manetta (XPUB) - Practical help with website creation, feedback & conceptual development.
Atelier Adam Nathaniel Furman (UK) - architect who works in creating space for the other.
Florian Cramer (NL) - writer who has an extensive knowledge of media theory and forgotten platforms.
Virtual world developer- why are these spaces created this way, and what are the goals in the development
Josephine Bosma (AMS) - Extensive knowledge in Net-Art.
Restorativ.org - Collective that is archiving and publishing platforms that are no longer online.
SpaceHey- A group dedicated to creating a space online reminiscent of MySpace.

Relation to previous practice

My previous practice is heavily influenced by the forgotten and fringe spaces of both the virtual and physical world. I am interested in the effects of standardisation and how time shifts, resulting often in abandoned ideas, buildings and promises. Previously I have explored the concept of Non-Places in the physical world and want to find the digital equivalent. In a previous special issue (#14) I created a game that used the forgotten audio aspects of a non-place (a doctor's waiting room) and instead used these audio components as ingredients to play and create new compositions. I wanted to explore using the preexisting and find the affordances of the space. I am interested in restructuring these spaces in a way to reignite the imagination and serve as a new medium for publishing works.

One of my earlier projects was to create a 3D online exhibition space to counter the growing number of graduates from a Brighton art school that were finding it increasingly difficult to find places to exhibit their works in the highly competitive art industry of London and beyond. This ignited my interest in the online space as an alternative for artistic projects.

Relation to a larger context

My project is situated in many fields, it takes ideas from situationism, specifically play, non-places in architecture and also can be viewed as a practice of media archaeology. While it uses my background in architecture as a starting point, it extends the concept to virtual world architecture, worlding and the anthropological study of space, It can help us rethink the capabilities of platforms long forgotten and give purpose to pre-existing spaces instead of the constant saturation of new worlds. It is what I feel is the next step of projects such as Space Hey & Restorativ.org which mostly aim to archive the forgotten, my extra step would be to activate these places.

References

Dekker, A, Wolfsberger, A. and Virtueel Platform (Amsterdam (2009). Walled Garden. Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform. ‌Der, V. (2017). School of Missing Studies. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
‌Bowker, G.C. and Susan Leigh Star (2008). Sorting things out : classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press
‌Bey, H. (2004). T.A.Z. : the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. New York: Autonomedia ; London.
‌Turkle, S. and Schuster, S. (2014). Life on the screen : identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, Dr.
‌Castronova, E. (2007). Synthetic worlds : the business and culture of online games. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
‌Chiang, T. (2010). The lifecycle of software objects. Burton, Mi: Subterranean Press.
Buerger, M., Dragan Espenschied, Olia Lialina and Merz-Akademie (2009). Digital folklore. Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude.
Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community : homesteading on the electronic frontier. Cambridge, Mass.: Mit Press