COMMON GROUNDS

International network of virtual worlds

Wayne Ashley, curator, NY

For the past five years the artist collective Workspace Unlimited has been creating mixed reality events and installations that explore new forms of art, architecture and sociability. Conceptually tied to and physically installed in real places, the collective's 3D virtual worlds are part of an ongoing investigation into the immaterial architecture of information flows within physical space, and their impact on notions of self, place, and identity. Networked together via broadband Internet, their virtual worlds constitute an artist-driven platform called Common Grounds, an ongoing initiative for exploring the poetic possibilities of multiplayer gaming technology and augmented space; and developing critical dialogues and research opportunities among academia, industry and art.

Unlike the game spaces we are accustomed to inhabiting-the gothic, medieval, and futuristic settings of Quake, the surrealistic puzzle worlds of Myst, the fantasy islands of Warcraft or the simplified parallel reality of Second Life, Workspace Unlimited's digital worlds and installations have been connected to a number of existing public spaces and architectural environments in Europe, Asia and North America. Examples include EXTENSION (2002), created for the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal, DEVMAP (2004), commissioned by the V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, and IMPLANT (2006), linked to the Vooruit, a performance venue in Gent.

EXTENSION: Virtual double

In EXTENSION (2003), Thomas Soetens and Kora Van den Bulcke built an online virtual architectural extension "on top of" the Society for Art and Technology (SAT), which they installed on computers inside the rather unremarkable building located in the cultural center of Montreal. Visitors inside the SAT, together with a networked public from Rotterdam and Gent, first accessed EXTENSION by entering a digital replica of the building's ground floor lobby, and then passed into a fictional elevator that transported them to a dazzling virtual glass and steel Zeppelin-like addition. Once inside the extension, users explored a number of interactive digital art installations created with the Quake III gaming engine: Storyscape, a non-linear 3D navigable story whose text and meanings literally distort and shift in response to users' movements; Blind Love, an actual game that requires two people to cooperatively find their way out of a darkened labyrinth, and Infinite 60 Seconds, a dynamic and generative soundscape based on a 60 second recording of a watch.

One of most disturbing installations, Diplomatic Arena, consisted of three deafening and visually bloody "levels" depicting the ethical bankruptcy of pre-emptive killing. The collective programmed a number of computer-controlled 3D players or "bots" representing political figures in the media spectacle on terrorism to engage in an endless horrific cycle of futile self-destruction. Each time a bot killed another bot, it was immediately resurrected into the same never-ending cycle of retribution.

The artists challenged us to consider how a real building might have an ongoing relationship to its networked and virtual double. They suggested that the virtual extension exist simultaneously as a functioning addition to the actual building's artistic programming and values, offering a new networked public temporally simultaneous activities in spatially discontinuous locations.

DEVMAP: Parallel realities

Where issues of space and location were central to EXTENSION, it was time that was critical in DEVMAP, a work commissioned by the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (DEAF) in 2004. The Dutch Electronic Arts Festival is a biennial international and interdisciplinary festival organized by V2_ in Rotterdam. In this work, the artists asked how a temporary media art festival might be re-coded as a constantly expanding, spatially indeterminate environment influenced and shaped by users' individual paths through real time data. The collective did not attempt to document the festival, nor did they try to re-produce it for a remote audience. Instead, DEVMAP produced a poetic memory of the event, full of lapses, mutations, and shifting juxtapositions, a living archive of the event that was fed back to each festival participant as a unique individually created experience.

During the festival, DEVMAP tied into the festival's own network, intercepting live audiovisual streams and data flows connected with the festival and the other new media artworks on display. Webcam images of events, broadcast streams, artists' interviews, online webgrabs and reports were captured as they occurred in real time. These were instantly ported to a computer where a modified Quake III game engine continuously retrieved, remixed, and morphed the data, which participants accessed at the festival or remotely in Montreal and Gent. As members of an online public moved their avatars through the environment, and chose particular paths to explore, the software responded by transforming and manipulating the data into a constantly morphing fluid virtual world. Moreover, the itinerant paths that users created through this vast dataspace were literally mapped onto their avatar's skins, communicating to others where they had been and what data they had encountered. And where designers of most virtual worlds take pains to create visual stability and consistency so that users see and act upon the same visual cues over time, Workspace undermined this, serving up different versions of the data to each user. So while two visitors could actually see each other's avatars, chat together and be in the same virtual space, the realties they saw and heard were completely different, thus simultaneously experiencing unique parallel realities.

IMPLANT: The Hypermediated Building

IMPLANT (2006) is situated inside the Art Nouveau building of Vooruit, a performing arts complex in Belgium. Navigating with a mouse, keyboard, and projected onto various surfaces, online visitors from Montreal, Rotterdam, and Gent together explore what first appears to be a sumptuous 3D simulation of Vooruit-a large maze of theater spaces, cafes, meeting rooms, and offices. These can be traversed in much the same way we move through physical space-walking upstairs, through doors, down corridors, around corners, inside and out.

But this logical order soon gives way to architectural and spatial inversions and re-perceptions. As visitors move through the building, their glowing paths reveal a hypermediated environment of text, real time chat, pre-recorded and live streaming video of artists, activists, and curators, reflecting upon the conditions of urban life and technology, cultural hybridity, and the virtual self. Each visitor's trajectory through IMPLANT re-narrativizes the building and its function, offering multiple, simultaneous points of view that cannot be easily reconciled. Viewers share their real-time journeys with each other by taking up in-world virtual cameras that project immediately what they see onto specific walls located throughout the building. What appears to be a mere projection, however, is actually an entire 3D rendering of that portion of the world, allowing viewers to instantaneously enter the image and join their fellow users in another part of the newly constructed world.

Outside, on the actual street, passersby peer into Vooruit's glass lobby, only to see a projected simulation of the same lobby seamlessly integrated within the building's façade. Instead of seeing the usual theatergoers purchasing tickets and socializing with friends, viewers observe the goings-on of avatars, real-time graphical representations of actual people in Vooruit co-mingling and exploring the same simulated space with their counterparts. At the same time, a webcam outside Vooruit captures the scenery on the street, projecting the performances of everyday life back into the virtual world.

Augmented Spaces

The power of COMMON GROUNDS lies precisely in the interactions and gaps between multiple spaces-what users in each location see and experience within the networked virtual environment, juxtaposed with what they see and hear in the spaces they physically inhabit, and what they share and communicate with each other in this novel, unfamiliar and collective social framework.

Document of Workspace Unlimited vzw

Text for BAM publication, feb. 6, 2008.