Virtual architecture: reconstructing architecture through photography

The concept of construction in architectural design process is a temporary action that exists for a while and transforms itself into another product; i.e. the final building to be inhabited. Construction site can be taken as a podium where a play-to-remain-incomplete is being staged. The incompleteness causes us to dream, due to the fact that a complete building loses its narrative potential as it informs us about all the necessary pieces that constitute the whole: There is no puzzle to solve... Construction in this sense is like a historical ruin; Paul Zucker asserts that "ruins have held for a long time a unique position in the visual, emotional, and literary imagery of man. They have fascinated artists, poets, scholars, and sightseers alike. Devastated by time or willful destruction, incomplete as they are, they represent a combination of man-made forms and of organic nature." Architectural photography has the potential of re-creating this puzzle back again in order to bring an alternative representation to architecture. The architectural photographer is sometimes offered the freedom of reinterpreting, reconstructing architecture in order to be able to present a novel virtual perception to the audience. The idea here is to get some spatial clues that can later be used in other architectural projects. I was personally invited to two different concept exhibits in which I was given the freedom of inventing a virtual architecture through photography. The concept text written for one of these exhibits goes as follows: “I went, saw, stopped, attempted to grasp and enter it, looked at construction process and workers with respect, tried to internalize, wanted to claim it for a while, dreamed of creating a microcosm out of the macrocosm I was in, shot and shot and shot and finally selected: The created world, though intended for all, was probably quite a personal illusion...” Virtual architecture is a term used for architecture specifically created in the computer environment and never used in the realm of architectural photography. People like Piranesi, Lebbeus Woods, M.C. Escher, Marcos Novak, etc. previously dreamed about architectures that could exist virtually on paper, screen, digital environments. This paper will try to prove that this practice of (re)designing architecture virtually can be transferred to one of the most important realms of visuality: Photography. Various digital processes like stitching multiple photos together and mirroring images in image editing software like Photoshop, allow this virtual architecture to take place in the computer environment. Following this, I propose to raise the term “snap architecture” to connect it to the frequently referred concept of “paper architecture.” Keywords: virtual, (re)construction, snap architecture, paper architecture, illusion, puzzle, incompleteness, representation, perception, reinterpretation, microcosm vs. macrocosm, fictional architecture, metaspace, narrative space, generative architecture

Smaller = denser, and the brain knows it: natural statistics of object density shape weight expectations.

If one nondescript object's volume is twice that of another, is it necessarily twice as heavy? As larger objects are typically heavier than smaller ones, one might assume humans use such heuristics in preparing to lift novel objects if other informative cues (e.g., material, previous lifts) are unavailable. However, it is also known that humans are sensitive to statistical properties of our environments, and that such sensitivity can bias perception. Here we asked whether statistical regularities in properties of liftable, everyday objects would bias human observers' predictions about objects' weight relationships. We developed state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to precisely measure the volume of everyday objects, and also measured their weight. We discovered that for liftable man-made objects, "twice as large" doesn't mean "twice as heavy": Smaller objects are typically denser, following a power function of volume. Interestingly, this "smaller is denser" relationship does not hold for natural or unliftable objects, suggesting some ideal density range for objects designed to be lifted. We then asked human observers to predict weight relationships between novel objects without lifting them; crucially, these weight predictions quantitatively match typical weight relationships shown by similarly-sized objects in everyday environments. These results indicate that the human brain represents the statistics of everyday objects and that this representation can be quantitatively abstracted and applied to novel objects. Finally, that the brain possesses and can use precise knowledge of the nonlinear association between size and weight carries important implications for implementation of forward models of motor control in artificial systems

Telepresence and the Role of the Senses

The telepresence experience can be evoked in a number of ways. A well-known example is a player of videogames who reports about a telepresence experience, a subjective experience of being in one place or environment, even when physically situated in another place. In this paper we set the phenomenon of telepresence into a theoretical framework. As people react subjectively to stimuli from telepresence, empirical studies can give more evidence about the phenomenon. Thus, our contribution is to bridge the theoretical with the empirical. We discuss theories of perception with an emphasis on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gibson, the role of the senses and the Spinozian belief procedure. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon. A telepresence-study that included the affordance concept is used to empirically study how players report sense-reactions to virtual sightseeing in two cities. We investigate and explore the interplay of the philosophical and the empirical. The findings indicate that it is not only the visual sense that plays a role in this experience, but all senses

Affordances of Historic Urban Landscapes: an Ecological Understanding of Human Interaction with the Past

Heritage has been defined differently in European contexts. Despite differences, a common challenge for historic urban landscape management is the integration of tangible and intangible heritage. Integration demands an active view of perception and human-landscape interaction where intangible values are linked to specific places and meanings are attached to particular cultural practices and socio-spatial organisation. Tangible and intangible values can be examined as part of a system of affordances (potentialities) a place, artefact or cultural practice has to offer. This paper discusses how an ‘affordance analysis’ may serve as a useful tool for the management of historic urban landscapes

On environments as systemic exoskeletons: Crosscutting optimizers and antifragility enablers

Classic approaches to General Systems Theory often adopt an individual perspective and a limited number of systemic classes. As a result, those classes include a wide number and variety of systems that result equivalent to each other. This paper introduces a different approach: First, systems belonging to a same class are further differentiated according to five major general characteristics. This introduces a "horizontal dimension" to system classification. A second component of our approach considers systems as nested compositional hierarchies of other sub-systems. The resulting "vertical dimension" further specializes the systemic classes and makes it easier to assess similarities and differences regarding properties such as resilience, performance, and quality-of-experience. Our approach is exemplified by considering a telemonitoring system designed in the framework of Flemish project "Little Sister". We show how our approach makes it possible to design intelligent environments able to closely follow a system's horizontal and vertical organization and to artificially augment its features by serving as crosscutting optimizers and as enablers of antifragile behaviors.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments. Extends conference papers [10,12,15]. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40860-015-0006-

Modelling the relationship between planning, control, perception and execution behaviours in interactive worksystems

This paper presents a model of planning carried out by interactive worksystems which attempts: 1. To describe the relationship between planning, control, perception and execution behaviours; 2. To make explicit how these may be distributed across the user and physically separate devices. Such a model, it is argued, is more suitable to support HCI design practice than theories of planning in cognitive science which focus on problem-solving methods and representations. To demonstrate the application of the model to work situations, it is illustrated by examples drawn from an observational study of secretarial office administration

The perception of emotion in artificial agents

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents

An Action-Based Approach to Presence: Foundations and Methods

This chapter presents an action-based approach to presence. It starts by briefly describing the theoretical and empirical foundations of this approach, formalized into three key notions of place/space, action and mediation. In the light of these notions, some common assumptions about presence are then questioned: assuming a neat distinction between virtual and real environments, taking for granted the contours of the mediated environment and considering presence as a purely personal state. Some possible research topics opened up by adopting action as a unit of analysis are illustrated. Finally, a case study on driving as a form of mediated presence is discussed, to provocatively illustrate the flexibility of this approach as a unified framework for presence in digital and physical environment

Social Objects

One reason for the renewed interest in Austrian philosophy, and especially in the work of Brentano and his followers, turns on the fact that analytic philosophers have become once again interested in the traditional problems of metaphysics. It was Brentano, Husserl, and the philosophers and psychologists whom they influenced, who drew attention to the thorny problem of intentionality, the problem of giving an account of the relation between acts and objects or, more generally, between the psychological environments of cognitive subjects and the different sorts of external (physical, geographical, social) environments which they inhabit. The present essay addresses this environmental version of the problem of intentionality. It draws not only on the work of Husserl and Scheler but also on the Gestalt psychological writings of Kurt Koffka and Kurt Lewin. It considers the influential subjective idealist theory of animal environments put forward by J. von Uexküll and contrasts this with a realist theory of organism-environment interaction based on the work of the ecological psychologists J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker. This realist theory is then exploited as a basis for an ontology of social objects of a range of different sorts. (This is the English original of the French translation.