Exploring meanings of space.

One day when I was in high school, I saw a caterpillar crawling up my knee. That very day, I made my first song, “Caterpillar” which was about a caterpillar who thought it would turn into a butterfly only to learn that it would eventually become a moth. It has been already 11 years since than. Throughout the years, I have begun to realize that I was not meant to be a musician nor was I talented in playing musical instruments. However, today I still play my guitar and try to make music in my new room, 5646 miles away from the place where I used to make songs about insects. 

Imagine being able to return to a place where we can let others understand ourselves. When I share the memory with others, the old room is experienced in the telling of my own story. Indeed, the meaning of a space depends on our memories that tie us to that place. The advantage of being in the world where we live in now is that we become able to handle and share stories about our values, interest, memories instantly using the internet. Similar to the way in which our dwelling-places hold valuable information of former days, our traces in the virtual space leads others to the stories about ourselves. In reality, geographical location is almost meaningless to some people as distant places are connected virtually and instantaneously through the invisible network. For each and one of us, the conceptions and boundaries of our surrounding structure are changing day by day as the pervasive networking technology advances. It may be easy to laugh at the idea of a world where every object and space share their stories in the network cloud and communicate amongst themselves. Yet, in truth, this thought have been thriving over the years not only in science fiction novels from the 1950s but also in Mark Weiser’s essay in ubiquitous computing written in 1988. The cyberspace is no longer considered as merely a parallel universe to the tangible world, rather in a new era of technology, many believe that the physical space will have the aspects of the digital environment. 

This research focuses on exploring the new meanings of architectural space in a world of pervasive computing environment. My belief is that through computation and technology, space will be more considered as a significant medium for effective communication. Through this research, I would like to investigate the ways in which recent notion of space can generate new modes of people’s behaviors, gestures, and occupancy in their surroundings. The point is to discuss how technology influences people’s everyday practice, usage of common objects, and occupancy of their physical surroundings and change the meaning of spatial relations.

• How can computational environment introduce ideas of public space as an extension of private environment?

• How does the body, physical objects, digital elements, and space affect one another?

• What types of expression can be achieved through a surrounding structure that has digital quality?

These are questions that I address through my process.