These spaces can allow for engaging another set of people, even another self – a double life, parallel life, or second life. Their influence can lead to cultural neurosis, a numbed pleasure brought about by volunteered self-lobotomization, but also the opposite: community, even political action, subversion, and rebellion within the given narrative of the late-capitalist condition. Behind the charge of anonymity and security, new agency is found in a platform for social engagement that extends to the real world, and emerges, innocently enough, from play. Where the moment of action is concerned is in the architecture/infrastructure between the virtual and the real. These metropolitan nomads have capsules to do what they want, even become agents of destabilization. Architecture becomes the terrible pacifier, the ultra-confiner, and the great enabler.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Homo Ludens Ludens: New Babylon Reloaded: Media Immersion Pods in Tokyo, Japan
Architecture today encounters a parallax in the development of new typologies of space – spaces that are merging and emerging from the confluence of the physical and the virtual in the form of the digital; categorically, they are spaces of play: experimental grounds, gaps between materials and ideas, and spaces of marginality and interstitiality, integral to our contemporaneity, not only embodying, but also defining and changing our cultural, spatial, temporal, and experiential way of perception and expression.
The site of investigation is the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, Japan, which sits in a futurology of paradoxes, in a hybridized society of spectacle played to both extremes; of fantasizing and dreaming in public, a space between the private and the consensual; of escapist physical seclusion, but socially-mediated through cyberspace. It is the ground-zero to such spaces as media immersion pods, manga cafés, and arcades: the spatial prototypes of technological, social, and cultural gates to sub-, counter-, and crash culture, typological amalgams that question the presence of free will, democracy, or agency/identity. As social constructs, they hold the potential to even become “liberating”, polarizing forces of difference, the Machines for the Socio-Personal Life of the Future.
These spaces can allow for engaging another set of people, even another self – a double life, parallel life, or second life. Their influence can lead to cultural neurosis, a numbed pleasure brought about by volunteered self-lobotomization, but also the opposite: community, even political action, subversion, and rebellion within the given narrative of the late-capitalist condition. Behind the charge of anonymity and security, new agency is found in a platform for social engagement that extends to the real world, and emerges, innocently enough, from play. Where the moment of action is concerned is in the architecture/infrastructure between the virtual and the real. These metropolitan nomads have capsules to do what they want, even become agents of destabilization. Architecture becomes the terrible pacifier, the ultra-confiner, and the great enabler.
These spaces can allow for engaging another set of people, even another self – a double life, parallel life, or second life. Their influence can lead to cultural neurosis, a numbed pleasure brought about by volunteered self-lobotomization, but also the opposite: community, even political action, subversion, and rebellion within the given narrative of the late-capitalist condition. Behind the charge of anonymity and security, new agency is found in a platform for social engagement that extends to the real world, and emerges, innocently enough, from play. Where the moment of action is concerned is in the architecture/infrastructure between the virtual and the real. These metropolitan nomads have capsules to do what they want, even become agents of destabilization. Architecture becomes the terrible pacifier, the ultra-confiner, and the great enabler.
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