Symptomatic Architectures: Spatial Aspects of Digital Experience
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Architecture and the Experience of Digital Spatiality
Presentation Title:
- Symptomatic Architectures: Spatial Aspects of Digital Experience
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
This paper investigates the spatiality of cyberspace and the way it connects to an individual’s personal experience. It deals with the nature of digital space in correspondence with the mental phenomena occurring to its inhabitants.More specifically, the research attempts to introduce a series of conceptual analogies that describe the spatial qualities of cyberspace through the mental state of its users. This happens through the introduction of some altered kinds of architectures that could also outline a theoretical configuration of the notion of the ‘digital body’. These architectonic scenarios are referred as ‘symptomatic’ architectures since they are discovered through a process of diagnosis of the mental and psychological experiences of an internet user.
Symptoms serve as the means to introduce qualities of physicality and phenomenology to the exploration of the digital space. They act as mechanisms of manifestation and they perform processes of corporealization onto the disembodied mind. In that way, they function constructively, as far as the invention of symptomatic architectures is concerned.
Abstracts such as dissociative, inertial, echoic and phantasmal architectures will be developed, constituting self scenarios and spatial narratives. The research aspires to explore alternative ways of apprehending digital experience, through fragments of a differentiated rather than disordered mental continuum – the digital space.
