The Uncanny Canyon
THE UNCANNY CANYON
Corporeal Nostalgia,
Real Estate of Tomorrow & the Final Human Form.
The advent of the 2020 pandemic catalyzes an inevitable evolutionary adjustment to our lives, structural modus operandi, and the shape of community and social collusion. When once we could move and meet freely, we can now more easily imagine a future where social coordination is mediated by scripts & machines, and face-to-face human interaction as we have lived it has become a thing of past. A once dystopian nightmare now seems the only viable vision for the future.
Learning to navigate a new digital landscape mitigated by screens and avatars, we find ourselves suspended everywhere and nowhere all at once. As we migrate into the virtual realm, what is taken along? What evolves, what is reinvented, and what gets left behind? What then becomes of our built environments, architectural codes, user ritual and spatial traditions?
In the infinitude of VR, space is grown; additively ‘carved’ into vacuum as we navigate it. Entrances now a set of origin points to spawn into, and circulation a series of gateways to teleport through coded non-linear environments.
What defines the plot-limit, now a factor of server capacities and RAMspace?
With gravity gone, we forgo our ortho-planar understanding of space for parametric, adaptive, and algorithmic communication of bits and pixels.
Resolution, scalability, computing power, real-time rendering, encryption and elegant code will determine virtual property value.
As with the advent of hi-res screen technology, we strive for hyper-reality in UI design, only to abandon it for an elevated flat graphic user experience.The skeuomorphic evolution of VR will see simultaneous, exponential, asymptotic advancement both towards-and-away-from the real.
More than ever, the epicentre of spatial experience becomes our POV. As we morphose into digital selves do we recreate our terrestrial bodies, reinvent our physiques, or abandon the corporeal altogether? The body serves as a relic of physical nostalgia when we can re-spawn into virtual space as pure singularity and take on our natural, evolutionary final form; a set of coordinates, a point of omniscient presence.
The uncanny valley of virtual space is not so one- dimensional. Rather an undulating landscape of negotiation with our species’ heritage and senses of ancestral self. Will we sacrifice millennia of anthro-genetic conditioning to ascend virtual realms?