Fun with cyber Geometry.

GAME SET AND MATCH II: ON COMPUTER GAMES, ADVANCED GEOMETRIES AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

Edited by Kas Oosterhuis, Lukas Feireiss. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. 2007. [euro]45

This book is an amalgam of papers presented at a conference in Delft from 29 March to 1 April 2006. The much smaller first GSM conference was held nearly five years before in 2001. Both conferences were the brainchild of Kas Oosterhuis and his Hyperbody Research Group at the Delft University of Technology. The first problem for any convenor, editor or cyber evangelist is to create a way of ordering all the disparate approaches that are now evolving in digital architecture. GSM II is divided into three main parts: Game, Play, Architecture and Gaming; Set Geometry, Architecture and Advanced Geometries; Match, Open Source, Architecture and Digital Technologies. Each category has a small number of keynote speakers gathered from the cyber spatial old guard: Marcos Novak, Bernard Cache, Peter Weibel, John Frazer and Oosterhuis himself combined with some of the new bucks, Usman Haque, Phil Ayres and Tobi Schneider. While I cannot subscribe to the book's epistemology, there is much to interest the reader if the book is considered a snapshot in time. There is insight, miasma and plain old sophism, and a microcosm of what's happening in digital culture generally. One thing that is also refreshing is that the illustrations for the book shy away from the full cyber glitz and therefore the book maintains an air of dignity. High points include Usman Haque and Paul Pangaro's Paskian Environments, Marcos Novak's head spinning Allosphere and sixteen* (makers) Kielder Architecture/Installation.

Many of the protagonists, like Oosterhuis, subscribe to the notion that all matter, in common with the cyber sphere and its various transactions (eating food, playing cards and designing), covers all scales of information exchange, which can be made visible by computation. While this can often be a useful notion, I find myself in the wake of this digital reductivism looking toward ideas of particularity and exceptions to express difference, chance and personalised cybernetic world making. And when is somebody going to bring symbolism, decoration and enigma back into the twenty-first century semiotic vacuum? This book won't win prizes for graphic design but it will be useful when the architectural history of our era is written.