Haunted space [private] - Feature - the architecture of virtual reality - Critical Essay

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Sven Lutticken

The Romantic cult of the uncanny questioned idealist narratives of spiritual evolution by suggesting, however indirectly, that there are things that elude the subject, things that cannot be subsumed in a grand narrative. The uncanny, that fissure in an enlightened, rational world, was after all not a manifestation of some higher spiritual sphere, but a return of a primitive attitude toward the world. When Freud put Romanticism on the couch in his essay on the uncanny, he effectively used it to undercut the idealist side of Romanticism the belief in spiritual evolution it bequeathed to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. Similarly, the uncanny spaces in recent art sabotage a new tide of spiritual narratives revolving around the notion of cyberspace as a pure, new world where the past (the material world) can be left behind. But their very uncanny character also has a reassuring quality: das Unheimliche turns out to be heimisch after all. By staging a return to childish, "primitive" fears, it assures us that human concerns still matter. It is telling that Romanticism's darker side conceived the spiritual as already outdated. It was situated in the idealized realm of the Middle Ages or, as in gothic horror novels, in places like haunted mansions or castles that were remnants of the past--places that refused to become part of disenchanted modern space. The blossoming of the uncanny in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture is not so much an involuntary return of the repressed as it is the result of the desire to revert to an earlier state of things in order to be shielded against the empty, abstract modern world. Perhaps a truly empty house is more horrifying than a haunted one. Better invent ghosts than live alone. In Ruff's architectural photographs, and especially in his stereographs, it is precisely the absence of an overt uncanniness, of a suggestion that the world is alive and bearing us a grudge, that is uncanny.

SHOOTING IN THE HALLS OF MEMORY

The space of computer simulations such as MVRDV's MetaCity/DataTown is constructed along the lines of linear perspective. It obeys the same basic spatial rules as Renaissance painting. The crucial difference is of course that the Renaissance perspective is fixed, while the new perspective is mobile. If one could virtually roam though the space of a Piero della Francesca painting, one would quickly see that this is a pointless exercise, except to see how the painter has created a unique, two-dimensional view of a space that has no other reason to exist than to be seen from that single perspective. The most common experience of contemporary computer-generated, mobile and perspective space is undoubtedly not through an architect's presentations, but by playing computer games. Here the viewer is not passively submitting to virtual movements (as in the case of Metacity/Datatown), but largely creating them him- or herself. This makes for a sense of control that is absent in MVRDV's videos. In many games, it also cr eates a sense of constant danger. Whether one is driving on a race track or righting fantasy creeps in pseudo-medieval dungeons, one always has to be on guard. These are not spaces of contemplation, like those of painting, but of action. However, the action seems to take place in a parallel world where one can have superhuman powers. Computer games are like everyday equivalents of the Romantic-Idealist belief in spiritual evolution that are at work in recent cyber discourse. They enable one to become a character in a world where death is reduced to a minor embarrassment, followed by instant resurrection.