the condition synesthesia is a sort of personalized mode of perception. each individual perceives the world through different layers. if architecture could evoke a kind of synesthesia condition for the user, regardless of whether they are synesthetic, woulnd that then be able to bridge the virtual-reality arguement? if synesthesia exists entirely in the virtual through perception of colours, existing only in the mind, which isn't really there in reality...(then again, how do we know what that is?)..this can somehow relate back to virtual architecture being able to exist realistically
IngerSays: have you read "StrangeHorizons" yet? I would arge that it isn't only the synaesthetes who have a personalised mode of perception -Everyone experiences the world differently, this can be tested in visual illusions. Maybe architecture acts virtually in a different timeline to our awareness? As time passes meanings, associations, events accumulate and dissapate through the fabric of the building and its relationship to the city (most strongly manifested in iconic moments such as the world trade centre?). Every building looked at this way already has a virtual life - can it be made apparent? Is it already apparent? Is the question not so much "can we build the virtual" but "how can we reveal it"?
"Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see" Aldous Huxley
it just wouldn't be fair if the synesthetes were the only privelidged ones i guess...time..hmmm.....social content, cultural meanings, added on layers over the course of time, if during the process, this can be acknowledged adn somehow incorporated , then it could happen.....need more thoughts on this....will come back to it
"how we reveal the virtual".interesting.....i'd like to go back to proprioception, if upon entering a space one could somehow be reminded of another space ( deja-vu perhaps?) via proprioceptive mode, some sort of sixth sense, the space would have then been successful in tapping into a personal, virtual realm within the person. it could be done through movement and position, meaning, it would probably have to on a general level include movements which are familiar to all. example, what it feels like to be in a crowd, how a smoke-filled club feels like, drunkeness, etc. how can a building evoke such an experience which is familiar to us and yet not be that? something just struck me, sometimes being in an extremely crowded space feels as mortifying and strangling and lonely as being in a vast empty space. maybe this evoking does not need to be directly related, one memory can trigger others, a noisy space can or may lead a person to remember what it was like to be in a quiet space, so on so forth.
There's the issue of tactility as well that can be employed, walking on gravel, smooth surfaces etc, can evoke past experiences as well.