Project: Lshell

Designer: Basicray (Vladimir Muzhesky, Chun-Chi Wang, David Michael, Gaute Solas)

Date: 24/4/99

Concept: Lshell is an interactive virtual environment where artificial intelligence of architectural elements reacts to the intelligence of a user weaving temporary audio-visual patterns.  Transmutation of Unreal engine, Lshell is dependent on Unreal software.  Just like viral life forms penetrate biological systems Lshell is the first content element built into 3D gaming. Four more environments are on the way.  Lshell network is to come soon.  (Fore more theoretical info please refer to Background text below).

Presentation: Lshell requires 3D sound and projection systems

Demo: Lshell can be viewed on any Pentium PC 

Installation:


1. Install Unreal Client

2. Unzip lshell.zip into correspondent unreal folders, ie textures to textures, sounds to sounds, etc.

3. Copy folders Ray and Noweapon to your unreal directory


4. Open maps directory and Double click on Lshell.unr


Suggestion: If Unreal client asks for a cd, double click on uctunrl.exe in unreal/system and start Lshell

Background:

On Perceptual Economy: subversive tendencies in simulations


In the end of the millenium we find ourselves involved in compositing perceptual aggregats deployed somewhere in between electronic carriers and neurological pathways.  Crosshybrids of mutated military simulators and tweaked telephone relays, synthetic aggreagats pursue their line of transmutations and recently developed from goofy cock pit demo's into complex perceptual architectures.  What characterizes this structured synthetic spatiality is a juxtastaposition of perceptual and iconographic forms.  Users learn the matrix of  visual cortex stimulation through acquring trigger-flash reflex; at the same time they draw a link to emotional codes channeled through iconic targets.  Somewhere in between this relationship synthetic aggregats aproach life forms, reinterpret them into the multiplicity of phase spaces and here we go, perceptual economy is layed out with all its attributes: means of production, channels of distribution, conditioned cosummers and conceptual horizon.

Every economy is based on dissociation: it has to compile something which wasn't out there yet out of pregiven elements. The elments are usually context dependent. For example industrial economy is founded on a dissociation between sensor-motoric and central nervous system: while the first lays down procedural schemmes, the second contextualizes the elements of action.  Because both events never coincide production goes until it is internalized. Perceptual economy is an objective condition which follows this internilization.  The dissotiation occurs on neurological level between spatial and textual processing: visual space is disacted and when recognized as such can be packaged and sold.

Describing a phenomenon of percetual economy at stake is not an easy job.  It can be characterized as some kind of neuro-goshism.  First maoists dispersed means of production by forsing every social cell (a family) to produce steel in their back yard, then French leftists picked up the same practice as their political strategy, then cheap and unreliable (just like chinese selfmade steel) public terminals were introduced, then public VR games (first primitive stimulation matrices) appeared. 

Dispersed in between cognition and physical mobility perceptual economy doesn't constitute a state of affairs but redefines aggregat nature of reality.  Let's follow its developmental scheme further.  One day there is suddenly a multiplicity of production nodes arround the world: all they do is manufacture synthetic aggregats for children, middle agged, businessmen, students, disabled, carrier oriented, psychologically devastated, i.e for a wide range of public.  They flatten and commodify aggregats which causes a decay of initial subversive tendency which originated it all.  Those who happen to be aware of it following old revolutionary reflexes go into the masses and start metamutation: they tweak simulators providing necessary diversity for perceptual pool.  Some people argue that it is necessary reaction of economic environment, others would call it art (which is a legitamate argument considering that this activity is definetely underfunded).

Both commodifying and subversiveness is a part of one essential for perceptual economy process.  The reason why economic theories like that of Battaille still didn't make it into textbooks is because of the initial confusion about the product. The process of perceptual metamutation doesn't start with 3D shoot ups. Perceptual economy is a next stage after the geography collapsed and outer space industry didn't manage to deliver a new one.  A generic civilization need to expand the boundaries of its phase space and hence knowledgge space leads to continuous cristalization of paradigmatic focal points in re-cognized spatiality.  Given that this focal points can be synthethised with mobile attributes there is a new horizon if there is a new materia.  In search of the material western world shifted from its outer boundaries to its spatial structure.  Reconfiguring local and telelocal spaces became a vital issue.  Again an old and tested subversive technique of appropriation played a role.  Remote monitoring and control centers became  subjects of metamuation which turned them into ubiquitous nonlinear area or as we now say "net". Structurally, extended control center includes biosocial elements anchored in industrial economic space and electronic monitoring elements anchored in control- or tele-space.  Both of these elements spuriously relinked into bots: a complex of user reflexes and predefined remote machinery reactions displayed on the screen.

Bots predefined perceptual economy and following its basic dissasiation between spatial and textual processing disacted the image, unbeatable value of industrial economy.  Augmented reality was synthesized which  to quote Katashi Nagao and Jun Rekimoto two of its appostoles from Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc "has as its main theme the overlay of computer-synthesized images onto the user's real world view. Augmented reality covers interactive systems that can informationally extend the real world". 

Augmented reality thus indicated perceptual materia.  Next step was to reanimate virtual reality on a public platform and turn it into a conversion technique from industrial to perceptual economy or ultimate destributed image-space technology.Image is manipulated through space and image-space cluster is economic protoperspective, it lays out the horizon.

So here we are at the border were advertisement and product are merged in one complex cognitive-emotional hook up, and our micro-politics of perception are laid bare all over the network.  Architecture became a matrix of visual distribution, worlds turned into metaphors. Our perception extended its own modulations.  We need some neo-neo goshists to tweak this.


Contact:

Vladimir Muzhesky

basicray@thing.net

Vox: 917 2087082

The Thing

601 west 26th street

ny ny 10001




