Page 22 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 13
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Figure 1. Mader, Stublić, and Wiermann, Façade. Media facade, dimensions variable.
Orkuveitan headquarters, Reykjavik, Iceland. ©2008, Mader, Stublić, and Wiermann. Courtesy
of the artist.
The transformal might best be understood functionally, as the
stipulation of one disruptive plane onto the visual structure of another. A
naïve reading might assume this notion to include the realm of virtual reality,
but VR follows rather the differing aim of creating non-disruptive planarity
of maximal resemblance to the objectival cohesion of the physical world.
Instead, the divergent stratification of space, implying among other
phenomena, that of depth, which is to say more space, whether shallow or
filled, is the rhetorical force of the transformal, which in a cybercultural
context points to the function of the term I have been iterating: encoding. One
exemplar of this new duality, proposed as a media façade by the German
design firm of Mader, Stublić, and Wiermann on the headquarters of
Orkuveita Reykjavíkur, Iceland’s principal purveyor of geothermal power,
melds onto the presence of an architectural body the projection of
geometrical forms tightly bound to a new axis whose centre anchors to
indeterminate space (figure 1). Here, emblematic of cyberculture, is the
expression of transformal tension, a projective opposition between forces,
one entirely physical and conveying pure convexity and; the other, purely
notional and injecting into the physical a fervent concavity—with each
distending toward its own direction, which is to say, its own dimension.