Breaking the Game: The Virtual Worlds of Workspace Unlimited

Wayne Ashley

On the periphery of a multi-billion dollar global computer gaming industry exists an emerging group of impassioned artists, architects, filmmakers, and game enthusiasts who mine, recycle, and modify off-the-shelf videogames and massively multiplayer virtual worlds with unexpected and sometimes extraordinary results. Conflating the practices of consuming and producing in sometimes-uneasy ways, they exploit the tools, software code, graphics, and even the programming errors of the most popular videogames to fashion new cinematic forms (Machinima), soundscapes, interactive performances, talk show formats, and art installations.

Workspace Unlimited, a Belgian/Canadian artist collective founded in 2001 by artist Thomas Soetens and architect Kora Van den Bulcke, has been at the forefront of parallel gaming explorations, producing some of the most complex networked virtual worlds in collaboration with an international cadre of cultural institutions, curators, designers, and software engineers. Building a transdisciplinary platform that extends out from their artistic practice, the collective also produces its own workshops and panels, initiates research and development, generates newsletters and organizes its own symposia. These strategies have been critical to the collective's success, helping to circulate its ideas, and create networks that facilitate further collaborative opportunities. This move to enlarge and amplify their work beyond the boundaries of any circumscribed aesthetic object is part of a larger cultural shift, which for the past four or five decades has aimed at slowly de-materializing the object in favor of process, knowledge and experience.

New public domains

This shift mirrors both artists' careers. Van den Bulcke left the more traditional practice of architecture, while Soetens gave up a promising career in painting. And though both are conceptually engaged with the materiality of architectural space and urban life, their creative practice focuses on the production of electronic 3D interfaces that seek to activate a field of relations-between things, people, buildings, institutions, and the larger environment. For the last five years they have been developing diverse strategies of articulating the new public domains that connect physical urban spaces and the potential public sphere of the electronic networks. What kinds of aesthetic experiences, social networks, and perceptual fields can be created by combining the technologies of information, simulation and physical space? What are the challenges of building multiplayer virtual environments that function as public spaces? What forms might these take? Should the design of these spaces mimic, extend, or parallel the physical world, or be entirely fictional, abstract, or phantasmagoric?

Unlike the game spaces we are accustomed to inhabiting-the gothic, medieval, and futuristic settings of Quake, the surrealistic puzzle worlds of Myst, or the fantasy islands of Warcraft, Workspace Unlimited's digital worlds are conceptually tied to and physically installed in real places: EXTENSTION (2002) at the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal, DEVMAP (2004) at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, and IMPLANT (2006) at Vooruit, a performance venue in Gent.

Soetens and Van den Bulcke construct each online world by reprogramming and modifying the popular game Quake III, a multiplayer first-person shooter, which allows its users to employ the game's central software engine, change its graphics, sound, animations, and interactive possibilities. The worlds are linked together via broadband Internet connection, special servers, software, and protocols to create a networked social and public space for artistic expression and social exchange. Navigating with a mouse, keyboard, and projected onto various surfaces, visitors in each location together explore a complex, dynamic and continuous combination of many points, spaces and dimensions.

Futile self-destruction

In EXTENSION (2003), Soetens and 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 - Belgium first accessed EXTENSION by entering a digital replica of the building's ground floor lobby, and then 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. Soetens and Van den Bulcke 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.

Soetens and Van den Bulcke challenged us to consider how a real building might have an ongoing relationship to its networked and virtual double. They suggested 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.

A poetic memory

Where issues of space and location were central to EXTENSION, it was time that was critical to 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. Soetens and Van den Bulcke 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, a team of technicians captured live webcam images of the events, broadcast streams, artists' interviews, online webgrabs, and reports 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.

Transmittable architecture

Workspace Unlimited's newest work, IMPLANT, is both a networked interactive virtual world and an installation physically situated in the magnificent Art Nouveau building of Vooruit. Similar to EXTENSION, the artists create a digital 3D version of the entire building and its surrounding environs. Visitors can access and navigate this simulated building on computers from inside Vooruit and simultaneously from the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal, and V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. In this way Soetens and Van den Bulke exercise their most compelling gesture: re-imagining Vooruit as transmittable architecture, an ongoing and revisable place that does not adhere to our ordinary understanding of physics, nor to the continuities of space and time.

Once logged into one of the locations within the network, visitors explore two co-existing architectures. The first is a sumptuous simulation of the physical Vooruit, a large complex maze of theater spaces, cafes, meeting rooms, and offices which can be traversed in much the same way we move through physical space-walking upstairs, through doors, down corridors, around corners, inside and out. The second is a hidden hyperlinked architecture that emerges as users interact with the simulation's various walls and ceilings. This architecture is full of perceptual incongruities and complex dimensions-portals that transport us immediately to continuously shifting destinations within Vooruit according to the position of the visitor; virtual cameras that allow us to secretly follow other visitors, and project their journeys and activities onto walls in front of us; or we might even walk through the projection and find ourselves together with them in a new space.

Breaking the game

Outside on the real street, passersby peer into Vooruit's glass lobby only to see a projected simulation of the same lobby seamlessly integrated within Vooruit'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 in Montreal and Rotterdam. A web cam outside Vooruit captures the scene on the street, projecting the performances of everyday life back into the virtual world. The effect is dizzying as the borders between inside and outside the virtual world become unclear, and who is performing for whom confused.

The longer visitors explore IMPLANT, the more layers they encounter. Embedded throughout the virtual world and triggered at various moments users encounter video and sound documentation from a recent online symposium called Breaking the Game www.workspace-unlimited.org/breakingthegame. The symposium brought together an international group of competing theorists and practitioners to debate and reflect on virtual worlds, information technologies, and new possibilities for artistic practice and experience.

Workspace Unlimited is interested in breaking down oppositions between practice and theory, and seeks to explore creative ways of making virtual worlds that are simultaneously intellectual and poetic, hallucinatory and sensual.
(published in DAMn8 okt.-nov. 2006)
(Wayne Ashley is an independent curator and producer working at the interstices of performance, media, and technology. He lives in New York City. Contact: washley007@yahoo.com.)

Read the article in PDF (with pictures).