The following article was first published in Perspective Magzaine, April 2004

Beyond Interface, Toward Cybertecture
By W. Yang

Billboards protrude halfway over the streets and mobile phones ring all the time. This is the way many New Yorkers would describe their first impressions of Hong Kong. Even for people who are desensitized by the sensory overloads in big cities, an evening stroll through Mongkok is still deliciously hallucinogenic. Our streets are crowded not only with people and cars, but also with media and information that compete for the real estates of our time and attention. Many utopian visionaries have prophesized a future information society where the virtual and the physical would eventually converge. Instead, here in Hong Kong, the virtual and the physical collide. Far from a utopia, Hong Kong is a war zone, a battlefield that is waiting for courageous people and heroic deeds. From this battlefield, James Law emerges with a brave vision: cybertecture.

What is cybertecture exactly? The term describes a new frontier in the practice of architecture, where architects extend their designs to integrate virtualized activities into physical spaces. Cybertects would be creating places that are augmented by information, entertainment, communication, and electronic commerce. Although still in its infancy, cybertecture already has a clear direction. Derrick De Kerckhove, in his book The Architecture of Intelligence, stated that the architecture of cyberspace is the architecture of connections. Already, these connections are linking people separated by time and space, machines separated by incompatibility. As a result, Internet has already appropriated many pre-existing channels of communication, becoming part of our everyday life. What architecture needs to accomplish now, is to tap into this fast growing network of people and machines to create a hybridized, augmented reality. Cybertecture will be responsible to create these connections from the physical to the virtual.

The world around us is expanded by networked technologies, enriching our life with activities that are both physical and virtual. Many creative disciplines have been quick to adapt to this new reality. For example, the advertising industry has been making "multi-channel brand vehicles", which take advantage of both traditional media outlets and new technologies to create brand awareness. Architecture will soon follow suit. Here in Hong Kong, James Law Cybertecture is leading the way to create a new breed of spaces that are woven with machine intelligence and communication networks.

Before we can envision a future Hong Kong built on cybertecture, we must first clear the obfuscation of jargons that clutter our understanding. Since digital technologies and Internet have crept into the everyday practice of many creative professionals, it has been convenient to allude to ideas such as "cyber" and "virtual" to describe the fast changing natures of the creative process. Inadvertently, these words and ideas have been misused and wrongfully associated with individuals and projects that fall way short of the visions engendered by cybertects such as James Law.

First of all, cybertecture is not computer-aided design, nor is it the creation of new visual languages that glorifies the computer. In the past decade, architectural publications have been increasingly cluttered with colorful rendering of buildings on black backgrounds, gradually painting a dark and endless space in our minds that seems to represent "virtual reality". Unfortunately, these computer-generated spaces are mostly Cartesian in order, bound by gravity and scale. In no way do they depict the immaterial nature of the real cyberspace. Moreover, cybertecture is not necessarily the re-invention of architectural languages to express instability and movement. A glass curtain painted with fragmented sentences offers little more virtualized experience than a tiled concrete wall. A tilted column is no more cybernated than a straight one. Looking quickly through James Law's portfolio, it is tempting to conclude that he is developing a new look or a personal style. However, this new "style" is only a by-product. The core value of his cybertecture practice lies in crafts that have long existed before the information age.

The same way that our minds are connected to our bodies, the virtual and the physical should be compatible and complimentary by nature. Information, entertainment and architecture had a long history of symbiosis. Raphael's painting, School of Athens, uses Bramante's rational space as a compositional device to stage the cast of philosophers and scientists. The painting glorifies the spirit rationalism, at the height of the Renaissance. Painted on the reception area of the Pope's palace in the Vatican, it also depicted what St. Peter's could have been, if Bramante's proposals where not subsequently rejected and changed by his successors. School of Athens is an example of location specific information and entertainment that is integrated into architectural spaces. Its one point perspective enhances the vaulted room where it is placed, creating an illusion of infinite depth. Its content offers an insight into the place, becoming a layer of virtual space that overlaps the real.

Modernism, in its relentless pursuit of universality and abstraction, has dislocated individual creativity from the built environment. This dislocation is manifested in the polarization between the practices of art and architecture today. For the past century, art has thrived in the protected premises of museums and galleries. Artists who work in public spaces often have three options: make isolated objects and events, become subservient to architecture, or make commentaries about architecture. Seldom has art managed to create constructive dialogues with architecture, to extend and augment its context. In 1989, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc in Federal Plaza, downtown Manhattan, was demolished by court order. Critical acclaims not withstanding, Tilted Arc's 120 feet span was interfering with the everyday use of the architecture. Its demise, on one hand, shows how art has been under-represented in shaping public spaces. On the other hand, it proves that there is an overlap between the individual creativity of art and the universality architecture, and the potential is largely untapped.

One of the contemporary artists who straddle this divide is Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Her best-known work is probably Biddy Mason: Time and Space. It is series of plaques made of stone and steel. They could be found on the wall of a park, converted from a series of narrow parking lots off an interior street of Los Angeles. These plaques contain text and images that recount the story of an African-American midwife who lived on that specific site, long before Los Angeles was urbanized. Without relying on digital technology, de Bretteville is already offering a glimpse into the prophecy of cybertecture.

The world of cybertecture will be interwoven with transparent connections that dovetail virtual activities to physical places. However, right now, these connections between the virtual and the physical are still mediated through interfaces that are anything but transparent. The same way that the complexity of architecture must eventually be materialized by its walls, floors and ceiling, the life of cyberspace must be made material through devices such as keypads, monitors, speakers, and web cams. From standard PC consoles to digital camera that dispatches a picture through the Internet, to air conditioners that are controlled through mobiles phones, the diversity and sophistication of interfaces to the cyberspace is fast growing. However, most of these interfaces are generic and personal appliances, isolated from and independent of their physical contexts. Site-specific interfaces are still grossly primitive, compared to the refinements found on PDA's and mobile phones.

Interfaces in public spaces mostly fall into two categories: kiosks and emissive surfaces. Kiosks such as ATM's and public phones have been evolving slowly. On the streets or in a mall, kiosks are mostly found as freestanding objects, in odd with their surroundings. Wall projections and plasma screens, on the other hand, are often competing too much with architecture. Most of them are mere broadcasting outlets that lack interaction with the public. Unlike School of Athens and Biddy Mason, their contents are usually made in disregard of the history and the physical appearance of the place.

Strides have already been taken to make these interfaces transparent, and some examples could be found here in Hong Kong. James Laws Cybertecture, in numerous places, has installed telepresence interfaces in the shape of rectangular columns. They take on both material and virtual qualities simultaneously, providing both interventions in the architectural space and interactions away from the space. In PCCW shops and other temporary spaces, James Law has employed motion-tracking devices to measure the volume of pedestrian traffic. Bypassing conventional interface devices like mouse and keyboard, the human body becomes the input device that directly interacts with the intelligent spaces

Interfaces in physical spaces do not even need to be physically present. Space to Place [www.spacetoplace.com] is an ongoing project conducted in the School of Creative Media at City University. It is exploring ways to map our digital resources to Hong Kong's urban grids, using location-based technologies provided by mobile service carriers. By linking our personal knowledge and experiences to exact locations in Hong Kong, Space to Place becomes a kind of "operating system" that unifies the virtual with the physical. It provides a mental framework in which our life in the cyberspace would begin to coincide with our life in the city. In this system, the entire Hong Kong becomes one transparent interface; every single location in Hong Kong could be an invisible, but meaningful connection to the cyberspace.

In the near future, urban spaces of Hong Kong will be a rich and harmonious tapestry of information, entertainment, communication, and commerce. There won't be signage hanging at the wrong places, mobile phones ringing at the wrong time. Like a Juan Gris painting, in which depth, motion, and a plethora of media is precisely compressed onto a canvas, virtual activities will be meticulously integrated into the urban environment. The same way that cubists make the canvas appear flatter, cybertecture will make our city more material and real.