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Making Sense of Space The design and experience of virtual spaces as a tool for communication I K RYNA UKSA AND M C ARK HILDS AMSTERDAM (cid:129) BOSTON (cid:129) CAMBRIDGE (cid:129) HEIDELBERG (cid:129) LONDON NEW YORK (cid:129) OXFORD (cid:129) PARIS (cid:129) SAN DIEGO SAN FRANCISCO (cid:129) SINGAPORE (cid:129) SYDNEY (cid:129) TOKYO Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier Chandos Publishing Elsevier Limited The Boulevard Langford Lane Kidlington Oxford OXS 16B UK store.elsevier.com/Chandos-Publishing-/IMP_207/ Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Elsevier Limited Tel: +44 (0) 1865 843000 Fax: +44 (0) 1865 843010 store.elsevier.com First published in 2014 ISBN: 978-1-84334-740-8 (print) ISBN: 978-1-78063-406-7 (online) Chandos Information Professional Series ISSN: 2052-210X (print) and ISSN: 2052-2118 (online) Library of Congress Control Number: 2014931727 © I. Kuksa and M. Childs, 2014 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. 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List of figures 1.1 Reality–Virtuality Continuum 13 1.2 Stelarc performing in the Extract/Insert installation in the Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry, UK, 2012 16 1.3 View of the Birmingham Hippodrome stage from the auditorium 18 3.1 Designing the Green’s Mill virtual heritage environment 45 3.2 Simplified structure of Green’s Mill’s virtual heritage environment 46 3.3 The participant is guided to the focal point of transformation from one virtual heritage environment to another 47 3.4 Narrative structure (A) demonstrates the paths of participants exploring the virtual heritage environment and the ‘story worlds’ they encounter; (B) illustrates the non-linear narrative journeys the participant can take 48 4.1 The evolution of The Divine Comedy case study: from the archive to the classroom 63 5.1 The basis of Activity Theory 77 5.2 The essential elements of Activity Theory and their interrelationships 77 5.3 Relationships of various theoretical traditions within the Communities of Practice model 78 5.4 An extended Activity Theory model, incorporating situated experience (‘presence’) and identity 79 8.1 The Theatre of Epidavros in Second Life 104 ix Making Sense of Space 8.2 Dancing in the Caledon Gaiety 106 8.3 Distractions in the Theatre of Epidavros 107 8.4 Simultaneous discussions about theatres and dancing 108 8.5 Too many instructions on the screen – reducing immediacy 112 8.6 Negotiations at the Northland Government Offices 113 8.7 Final debrief session in the Community Council Room 113 9.1 Alice in WonderSLand performance by ART in Second Life 126 9.2 Ritual Circle 128 9.3 ART’s The Tempest in Second Life 131 9.4 Typology of theatre space in virtual worlds 135 9.5 Extract/Insert installation 136 9.6 The view of the physical space from the Second Life Extract/Insert installation 137 x Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Jim Davis and James Fair for reading the first draft of this book and for their helpful comments, encouragement and warm words. I am also very grateful to Deborah Tuck who contributed to the case study – ‘Exploring the Nottingham Reform Bill Riots through augmented reality’ – in Part 2 of the book, and to the Harry Ransom Centre, where the research for the ‘Scenography reborn in 3D’ case study took place. I thank especially my co-author Dr Mark Childs – not only for his hard work but also for being a very good friend. Finally, I thank Dr Christian Rutz for his interest in my work and for the support he gave me while I was working on this book. Iryna Kuksa I would like to thank Professors Jim Davis and Grainne Conole for reading through Parts 3 and 4 of the book and for giving me very timely suggestions on additions. I would also like to thank Graham Lewis and John Carter McKnight for their ideas and conversations about the topics of my part of this book, Anna Peachey for providing me with a place to start and for introducing me to first, second and third places, and above all to Diane Dupres for the many discussions about the last of the connections that made the idea of a ‘fourth place’ come together. I am also very grateful to all practitioners and academics who contributed to the case studies in Parts 3 and 4 of the book. Finally, thanks are due especially to Dr Iryna Kuksa – for providing me initially with a platform to write, and with whom the back and forth over the content of my sections resulted in the honing of my arguments and improvements in style. In the end it was worth it. Mark Childs xi About the authors Iryna Kuksa is a research fellow in art and design at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. In her research, Iryna investigates the challenges, and opportunities, encountered by practitioners and educators in using immersive virtual environments and in applying 3D visualization as research methodology. She examines a suite of rapidly-developing communication and computer-visualization techniques, which enable reciprocal exchange between viewers and artefacts and which transform the way in which we experience, learn and co-create our culture. Iryna is also Reviews Editor for Scene (published by Intellect), Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Staffordshire University, and has recently been awarded a Harry Ransom Fellowship to conduct her research on Norman Bel Geddes’ theatrical presentations at the University of Texas at Austin. Her broad research interests enable Iryna to make creative and inventive connections between various areas of knowledge, identifying exciting research questions and methodologies. She aspires to continue her research on immersive virtual environments, which are already an important aspect of current teaching and research and which promise enormous future potential for scholars in terms of understanding virtual ecologies and the sustainability of virtual performance spaces. Iryna can be contacted at [email protected]. Mark Childs is a senior research fellow at Coventry University, a senior researcher at Loughborough University and a visiting fellow at Leicester University. He is also a freelance consultant working within academia. Since 1997 Mark has worked on more than 30 projects involving technology-supported learning – as a researcher, consultant, evaluator, manager and principal investigator at Coventry University, and in previous posts at the Universities of Wolverhampton and Warwick. In 2010, he was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick for his thesis on ‘Learners’ experiences in virtual worlds’. xiii Making Sense of Space In his freelance work, Mark has been a consultant and evaluator for a range of private and public sector organizations, including Hewlett Packard, the Field Museum of National History in Chicago, Ravensbourne College, the Open University and JISC. His main research focus is the user experience of synchronous communication platforms, with his most recent work including virtual teamworking, online collaboration and peer learning via technology, but particularly learning and performance in virtual worlds and mixed reality. Mark can be contacted at [email protected]. xiv Introduction Introduction and rationale for the book We live in the digital age – the age of seamless communication and interactivity. We inhabit cyberspace (an unlimited, constantly expanding electronic terrain), which correlates with our physical reality, gradually becoming part of it. We use it for saving and storing information, for facilitating knowledge exchange and, importantly, for communicating with one another. Virtual spaces are not simply another way for people to express themselves in the same way they used to do. One might argue that they radically changed human perceptions of the surrounding world and even could be considered as a form of art. There is little doubt that technological development and its capability to constantly produce new multimedia applications is endless (at least to date). This affects our means of communication and brings a new (quite interactive) quality to our experiences of everyday life, art, history and culture. Interactivity is often referred to as something specific to new media technologies; in reality, however, it is an attribute of any representational media that simply enables a new form of communication. In his 2002 essay, ‘Reflections on digital imagery: of mice and men’, Paul Willemen defined interactivity as ‘a significant feature from classical Chinese poetry to the call-and-response structures of gospel and jazz music, to Surrealism’s “exquisite corpses” and to just about all forms of commercial verbal and imaged discourses in which feedback mechanisms have played a determining role for at least a century’ (Willemen, 2002: 14). Several years before this statement, back in 1999, Johannes Birringer distinguished the following modes of interaction applicable to digital artistic spaces that are still relevant nowadays. The first mode is a touch- screen interactivity that is widely presented in inter-media exhibitions and video installations with Internet access. The second mode is interactivity that extends deeper into digital space, implying distance and spatial xv