Tag Archives: place

One Aspect of Place is Missing?

Academic, digital heritage, Digital Humanities,

I enjoyed reading through the recent “Geographies of Place in Digital Art History” written by people I know (and one I have worked with and written papers with). But as an intellectual exercise, do you see anything missing from the concept of place as stated in the article?

Geographies of Place in Digital Art History

Sarah Middle, Ryan Horne, David A. McMeekin, Chiara Zuanni, and Alex Butterworth International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 2022 16:1, 94-109

3D and game editors, Academic, Architecture, board game, Conference, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, publication, virtual heritage, visualisation, workshop, , , , ,

“Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture” revised chapter, authored with Juan Hiriart, for “Playing Place” (edited by Medina Lasansky and Chad Randl, MIT Press) sent off today. Each chapter has a 1000 word limit, I believe. Took me some time to trim this! Great to work with Juan on a chapter, I think our different strengths blend well. When (or if?) the book appears on MIT Press I will add another post, the list of authors and topics looks really good, possibly essential reading if you are into boardgames, or are not, but want to know why so many people are …

Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture

Conveying built heritage values and historical knowledge through boardgame design may seem an odd decision. Communicating space, place, and culture through play is a challenge let alone through a medium inherently incapable of evoking the direct experience of inhabitation and architecture as a spatial art. Boardgames are engaging, social, quick to make, and fast to learn, intuitive or nuanced. From the complex to the spontaneous, boardgames can be effective, visceral tools for cultural immersion, challenging cultural assumptions and preconceptions, encouraging discussion and collaboration between players, provoking insight and enjoyment with simple props or intricate rules.

The following explains our experience hosting participative design workshops with historians, archaeologists, and heritage professionals. In small groups of three to four people, participants determine the design decisions, discussing and solving problems that often arise in an iterative process where historical research, game design, and play-testing both blend and butt heads.

Polynesian Philosophy

Conference, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, Symposium, virtual heritage, , , ,

I attended a conference at the University of Hawaii on the Philosophy of Place at the East-West Center.  Now philosophers there told me of their struggle to have Eastern philosophers accepted as Western-equivalent, there were criteria. But later, in our session someone from the audience said of course no one in Polynesia “did philosophy”. i did not hear their criteria for this judgement.

Their comment went round and round in my head, and although not my area at all, an idea began to take hold. In the meantime, I will collect little nuggets like this one and try to find more scholarly references:

https://www.travelweekly.com/Asia-Travel/Exploring-Polynesian-culture-beyond-Bora-Bora-Tahiti

Marae Taputapuatea was a sanctuary of great importance, and priests and navigators would come from all over French Polynesia to give offerings to the gods, hold initiation ceremonies and international gatherings, and discuss the origins of the universe.

If you are a scholar at a university in French Polynesia or Hawaii, and also interested in this unsettling declaration, please feel free to contact me..

notes about places

Architecture, Conference, , ,

I’m writing a book,  DESIGNING THE ‘PLACE’ OF VIRTUAL SPACE, Indiana University Press, Spatial Humanities series.

Current planned book chapters

  • Place Theory Applied To Virtual Environments
  • Dead, Dying, Failed Worlds
  • How Mind Remembers Space, How Places Are Meaningful And Evocative
  • Place Affordances Of Virtual Environments Learnt From Affordances In Real Places
  • Place Interaction And Mechanics
  • Learning From Place
  • Place-Making Devices, Place-Finding Devices
  • Evaluation
  • Conclusion

My notes include the following:

  1. Place theory seldom clarifies different types of place features and different types of place genres, for example, fantasy places. There are places imaginative because they don’t clearly and explicitly relate to current place objects or interactive place relations, or imaginative because they don’t follow common sense, lived experience, or known physics. I don’t however know of a classification of them suitable to the design of virtual worlds.
  2. Such places are captivating but vague, what are the general affordances that mark them out as distinctive places but allow a variety of events and actions to take place?
  3. The place affordances of mobile places (tents, boats, stones, trailers) are seldom described but of great design interest to me. Where do I find this literature?
  4. Places are typically
    1. gathering (a center focusing or center-pulling away)
    2. the placing or gathering components are imaginatively or allegorically linked
    3. ecosystems
    4. related to other places
    5. allow a placing between the dynamic and the static (is there a better word than threshold?) This allows them to support creativity or allow time to imagine creativity..
    6. Depict a marking by or resistance to time (no, not exactly Kenneth Frampton’s architecture as heroic environmental resistance or critical regionalism theory). A place is a diary of us, a tapestry of meetings, of planned and spontaneous encounters.
  5. Place evaluation: places are very difficult to evaluate, to capture or to imitate. It is very difficult to observe a place without being there (and hence the appeal of phenomenology). For they are more network than tree, not linear and not directly observable.
  6. The levels of observable interaction are granular but of differing scale and not actually tailored directly to the scale and capabilities of a human observer, something we often forget when we design a virtual place, where everything is meant to be observed from and be seen to make sense from a human-height eye level. The layers and eddies of reality are infinitely complex. That does not mean that everything needs to be simulated or generated about that place.

Philosophy of Place

Digital Humanities, , ,

Last week at the East-West Centre University of Hawaii was the Philosophers’ Place conference

I have not been to a Philosophy conference for around 25 years but it was a warm and inviting conference in a magnificient I. M. Pei designed venue with its own Japanese garden.

To be honest, a big reason to go was to hear Edward Casey speak. I learnt a great deal about Confucius and to lesser extent Laozi or Lao Tsu (not so much about place) but one question from CHENG Chung-ying (University of Hawai’i) really got me thinking: what exactly is virtuality?

Another big question or two lying in wait is what is philosophy? Do traditional non-western cultures have philosophy. Obviously to the Eastern philosophers there the answer is yes but how each saw as fundamental elements of philosophy was left unsaid.

A third issue, especially for ‘rationalist’ and western-trained philosophers was whether they should spend any time examining mythical beliefs, that was an interesting question at one panel I attended.

As to place and the design of place? I met a few designers and one architect interested in the question, but the majority of attendees seemed happy to just talk about it as if place was a given. Oh well.

Anyway, I recall a visualisation professor telling me he hated humanities conferences because they read full papers! Remembering this, I had a sudden dreadful suspicion I had to also write and read from a full paper when the panel chair emailed and suggested we share our papers first. Now I, being the idiot that I am, thought I had to write and read from a paper as well as deliver slides. I won’t bore you with the slides, but I wrote and sent a 6000 word paper, trying to explain why I was there. And that was to get feedback on hermeneutic environments and phenomenology for the evaluation of virtual places.

So that is what the draft paper circles around. I believe there will be proceedings so I may be asked to complete the paper. But someone may be interested in the draft paper and give me feedback in the meantime! Oh and the other speakers did not write or speak from or distribute written speeches. So I just talked to my slides.. 🙂

So here is the draft paper

 

 

 

 

abstract for 2016 East-West Philosophers’ Conference, Hawaii

Presentation, virtual heritage, visualisation, ,

Conference website: http://hawaii.edu/phil/2016-east-west-philosophers-conference-update/

Paper Title: Philosophical Issues of Place and the Past in Virtual Reality

There are indisputably many good reasons for finding and restoring heritage sites and artefacts with the most impartial and accurate scientific methods and technological advances. Yet the ICOMOS Burra Charter defines cultural significance in terms of the value of a place as it helps people understand the past, as it enriches the present, and educates future generations, these values can be aesthetic, historic, social or spiritual, (and thus not just scientific). Therefore it does not necessarily follow that the best user-experience for members of the public is purely based on a rigorous scientific perspective, because such a perspective does not fully explain the cultural significance of a place as experienced by the originators of the locally situated culture.

On the other hand, evoking cultural significance may be helped by a philosophical consideration of how specific human experiences can be understood and conveyed. The Dictionary of Philosophy says (on p.464) phenomenology “is the attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give”. While hermeneutics, it says (on p.274-5), “explores the kind of existence had by beings who are able to understand meanings, and to whom the world is primarily an object of understanding (rather than, say, of sense-perceptions)”.

I wish to investigate whether an approach that would best utilise multimedia and the differing multimodal ways in which we learn and experience the outside world would be phenomenological and hermeneutical. In other words it would attempt to understand how the way individual societies experience the world, how they interpret the world to themselves and to each other, how their cultural signs are made, modified, and learnt. It would also attempt to discover how the horizons of current visitors could be nudged out of balance by being either overwhelmed by encounters with genuine alterity (that is, sense of otherness), or by gradually learning how to be accepted in this totally different phenomenological world.

A further pressing issue in the design of virtual places and especially in the design of virtual heritage environments is to avoid the ‘museumization’ and ‘Western’ viewpoint as forewarned by Ziauddin Sardar and others. Can this technology help provide an appropriate sense of alterity and an appropriate situated sense of place?

References

ICOMOS, (1999).‘The Burra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS charter for the conservation of places of cultural significance’, http://www.icomos.org/australia/burracharter.html.

Mautner, T. (2005). Dictionary of Philosophy (Penguin Reference, 2nd edition, Suffolk United Kingdom: Penguin, Books, p. 464 and p.275.

Sardar, Z. (1996). alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West. In Cyberfutures: culture and politics on the information superhighway, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome Ravetz, 14-41. London: Pluto Press.

Call for Book Chapters: “Place and the Virtual”

Architecture, Book, cfp, heritage, publication, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, , ,

I am seeking 8-12 chapters for an edited book on “Place and the Virtual”. Proposed chapters can be on

  1. Definitions, main concepts, historical interpretations.
  2. Critical reviews of virtual places (theoretical or individual existing or past or future examples).
  3. Investigations into the similarities dissonances and differences between real places and virtual places.
  4. Applications of theories in other fields to the design or criticism of virtuality and place.
  5. Implications of related technologies, social trends, issues and applications.

Typical book chapter length: 5,000–8,000 words

Current Status of Proposal: The book proposal will be sent to the below editors for review when I have approximately 8-12 chapter abstracts.
Submission format: by email or attached word or RTF (rich text format) document, approximately 300-500 words.
Deadline for chapter abstracts: Still considering applications.

Email your abstract to: erik DOT champion AT Curtin DOT edu DOT au

Proposed to be part of a new planned Bloomsbury Books Series: Thinking Place, Series Editors Jessica Dubow and Jeff Malpas.Please distribute to interested parties.

call for chapters for edited book “Phenomenology, Place and Virtual Place”

Academic, Book, cfp, Digital Humanities, ,

Phenomenology, Place and Virtual Place: can phenomenology help us convey and understand the ‘virtual place’ experience?

I am seeking 3-5 chapters for an edited book on the history, implications and usefulness of phenomenology for real places and virtual places, with chapters by philosophers, cultural geographers, architects and archaeologists.

Main themes:

1 Phenomenology, definitions, main concepts, historical interpretations.

2 Critical reviews of phenomenology, successes failures and lessons learnt.

3 Strengths and weaknesses of phenomenology compared to other methods.

4 Context-specific and discipline-specific applications of phenomenology applied to place.

5 Particular place-centric phenomenological investigations, issues and applications.

6 Phenomenology applied to virtual places.

There are currently seven proposed authors (see below) but I am aiming to include three to five more authors though an open call for abstracts. Topic 3 is still to be addressed (as well as, to some extent, Topic 2) so I would be particularly happy to receive abstract/chapter submissions on these two topics. You may also notice we currently only have male authors, I asked four leading female writers/philosophers and they were all busy so I would be very happy for a wider and more inclusive spread of perspectives.

Current Proposed Chapters

Introduction by Distinguished Professor Jeffrey Malpas, University of Tasmania.

1 Phenomenology’s Preoccupations and Place, Professor Bruce Janz, University of Central Florida, United States of America.

2 An Encumbering, Confining Reality: Comparing and Contrasting Real Reality and Real Places with Virtual Reality and Virtual Places, Professor David Seamon, Kansas State University.

3 The Inconspicuous Familiarity of Landscapes, Professor Ted Relph, Emeritus Professor University of Toronto.

4 Heidegger’s Bauen, Wohnen, Denken in terms of Minecraft, Dr. Tobias Holischka, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt

5 Attention in virtual reality, Professor Richard Coyne, University of Edinburgh

6 Hermeneutics, Horizon and ‘Sense of Place’ Affordances in Virtual Environments, Professor Erik Champion, Curtin University

7 Using Mixed Reality to undertake archaeological phenomenology, Dr Stuart Eve, University of York

Typical book chapter length: 5,000–8,000 words
Philosophical emphasis: Yes as it is intended to be part of a series in Phenomenology (Philosophy) this will be a factor. However I would also be happy to receive submissions from writers with overlapping interests.

Current Status of Proposal: Have discussed with the editor of Routledge Research in Phenomenology and the book proposal will be sent to him for review when I have approximately 10-12 authors. We currently have seven authors.

Submission: by email or attached word or RTF document, approximately 300-500 words.

Deadline for chapter abstracts: Sunday 7 February 2016.

Deadline for draft chapters: Good question but I don’t know! I would probably aim for September 2016.

Email your abstract to: erik DOT champion AT Curtin edu au

Phenomenology and Place

Architecture, Book, design, , , ,

I wrote the below as an email to a small* group of writers/philosophers/academics I’ve found really helpful in my own thinking on phenomenology and place.
I won’t write their names (indeed, I have not even given them any time to respond yet) but I thought I would share my [redacted] email to them in case a reader here

  1. Totally disagrees with my premises and can help me improve them and/or..
  2. Believes they would have something worthy and useful to write in a potential book chapter on the topic.

Dear [insert your favorite live phenomenologist name here]…

For many years I have tried to understand place in virtual environments, how to understand how people experience it, and how to discover and communicate if there are elements of place missing from virtual environments and how to address that through criticism and through design.
My personal interest is in history and heritage (and cultural presence for archaeology simulations) but the problem is wider, and deeper than just virtual places.

I still feel that a possible help and a major problem comes from discussions of phenomenology, namely these:

  1. The role of phenomenology in philosophy is avoided by many philosophers (at least it was a problematic term when I wanted to study it in a philosophy department).
  2. Many outside philosophy use the word without clarifying or helping to clarify where and how it is best used and understood and its limitations (if any).
  3. Many of these papers lack critical analytical reflection and especially are not amenable to extrapolation beyond either the self or calls to authority (authority here usually means dead phenomenologists who are invoked for areas they never actually wrote about directly or perhaps for new discoveries that did not even exist in their time).
  4. In the Presence research area of virtual environment evaluation this is particularly evident yet the laboratory control conditions for Presence evaluations and their extremely generic yet vague questionnaires. Here phenomenology or some related ethnographic method could and should have an important role to play but because of its stigma (not helped by papers which haven’t always been the best examples of phenomenology) virtual environments (virtual reality environments, games, architectural simulations, virtual worlds) lack many of the rich interesting and engaging aspects and potential of place.

Sorry for the longish intro. My suggestion in brief, is probably an edited book: that compiles, describes and especially clarifies major techniques, conditions and limitations of phenomenology and how they could be used or adapted or critiqued for place design (and by extension, for virtual environments). The audience: I’d hope more for an audience of place interested designers and academics than philosophers per se.

*There were more people I had in mind to write to, but will extend the circle if I get a good response from the initial correspondents.

Uploaded some older papers: Virtual Places, and The Limits of Realism

Architecture, virtual heritage, , ,

Virtual Places
Article. From: Encyclopedia of virtual communities and technologies, 2006, Idea Group Reference

Communities identify and are identified by not just the clothes they wear or by the language they speak, or even by the way they greet each other. Communities are often identified by where their activities take place, how they use spaces to construct meanings, and the traces left by their social interactions. These “trigger” regions are thus not just points in space; they are also landmarks, havens, homes, ruins, or hells. Communities, then, are identified and identify with or against, not just space but place. For places do not just organize space; they orient,
identity, and animate the bodies, minds, and feelings of both inhabitants and visitors.

The Limits of Realism in Architectural Visualisation
Conference paper.
FOR: LIMITS XXIst annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand Melbourne, Australia (SAHANZ) 26–29 September, 2004 website: http://sahanz04.tce.rmit.edu.au/
ABSTRACT
In March 2004 the eminent scholar Professor Marco Frascari presented an informal seminar at the University of Melbourne in which he argued computer reconstructions of architecture were far too exact and thus too limited in conveying the mood and atmosphere of architecture. With all due respect to Professor Frascari, this paper will argue the converse: that recent developments in interactive technology offer new and exciting ways of conveying ‘lived’ and experientially deepened notions of architectural placemaking. Using current research findings in virtual presence studies, archaeological theory and site reports, as well as usability evaluations; this paper will examine the above issues in relation to a recently created and evaluated virtual reconstruction of a Mesoamerican cityLIMITS XXIst annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand Melbourne, Australia (SAHANZ) 26–29 September, 2004