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Authors: |
Novak, Marcos | |
Title: |
Eversion and Transmodernity | |
Keywords: |
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Abstract: |
Eversion is one of a growing set of
concepts I have proposed in describing the cultural and poetic circumstances brought about
by the exponential growth of information technologies. There can be little question that
we are tending toward a culture of ubiquitous virtuality. As modernity encounters the high
slopes of exponential change, it undergoes a phase transition into a new stage I call
transmodernities. The transition from modernity to transmodernities is not a sequential
development, as postmodernity presumed itself to be, but a change of state of modernity
when and where it encounters sufficiently great and accelerating change. Modernity and
transmodernity exist in parallel. What is implied here is that modernity is capable of
multiplicity and internal variability. If ordinary modernity is characterized by the
production of the new, transmodernity is characterized by the production of the alien. So
far we have experienced this exponential change primarily through immersion into
information technologies. As change accelerates, the technological becomes cultural and the immersive becomes everted. Hence, the transmodernity that has so far been brewing within information technologies has already begun to be cast onto the world at large by the very same forces that drive the economics and politics of technology. In other words, eversion makes the encounter with transmodernity as inevitable as television. Eversion complexifies the already altered nature of our relationship to spacetime. Space is no longer innocent. Cyberspace already implies a space laden with intelligence. For the time being, the metaphor and technology of immersion keeps cyberspace apart from our conventionally embodied experience. Eversion predicts that the phenomena we are familiar with in cyberspace will find their equivalent, everted forms in ordinary space. Thus, phenomenologically, the nature of space itself, this space, our space, is already undergoing significant changes into what I call newspace, the sum of local, remote, virtual, and interactivated space. Hence, we will encounter the transmodern-alien in a space already contaminated by the eversion of virtuality. |
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| Marcos Novak is honorary co-president
(with Paul Virilio) of the Transarchitectures Association in Paris. He is a
transarchitect, artist, and theorist investigating the emerging tectonics of
technologically augmented space. Widely regarded as a pioneer of the architecture of virtuality, he is the leading proponent of virtual environments as autonomous architectural spaces and of the Internet as an unprecedented, non-local, transurban, public domain. He is the author of numerous influential publications on the poetics of cyberspace and has originated internationally recognized concepts such as liquid architectures, transarchitectures, transmodernity, eversion, and others. Combining elements of architecture, music, and computation, his work investigates non-Euclidean conceptions of space and algorithmic emergence and morphogenesis. He was the founding Director of the RealityLab and the Advanced Design Research Program at the School of Architecture of the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught between 1989 and 1996. His designs and compositions have been realised in a variety of media and have been exhibited at many international venues, including nationally televised broadcasts on CNN and PBS, television and radio programs and interviews in Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, and Yugoslavia and other countries, music and dance performances at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at Delphi, Greece, and installations and exhibitions in the USA, The Netherlands, Sweden, Portugal, France, Italy, Austria, Brazil, and Canada, where he held a Residency Award at the Banff Center for the Arts (1992-1994). He lives in Venice, California, teaches at UCLA, and lectures worldwide. |
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