immaterial
Having no material body or form. [Answers.com]
This is a reductionist definition when applied to a virtual environment like a metaverse, where referring to something as immaterial is logically, a tautology. But I use it both in reference and in opposition to my use of the term material. It’s a reference because I think the substance of which something is fabricated can possess immaterial elements (like ideas, forces, tension etc..); and, it’s in opposition because of my insistence on using metaverse environments together with real one’s, in a way that one augments the other, and visa-versa.
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You’re currently reading “immaterial,” an entry on Metaverse Language
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- 7.11.06 / 12pm
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By pasting the image of a Norman constructive system to a specific form, size, shape, and proportion, we project a cognitive image of a functional intention… my home, for example. While this may, in fact, say something about the builder’s idea concerning the meaning of a home, it pre-supposes that home in SL is in fact, analogous to home in RL, and that my understanding of the sign, home, is the same as the builder’s. If not, its usage will not be consistent, the message not passed. What I’m advocating is that the meaning of the build, its usage and contextual significance, is induced from formal, atmospheric and socially driven experience with the space, rather than from a semantically referential one. While reference to RL architecture might work for some people, it begs the question for others : Architecture has always first and foremost offered shelter and security to its human inhabitants by partitioning the exterior, aggressive world by the creation of a safe, interior one, is and always has been, a medium for decoding the world around us. Through its basic, primeval role of defining the world between that which is secure or dangerous, human scale or vast, under control or savage, architecture has been a materialization of the passage from one state to the other, a device from which we could measure the world around us and a filter from which we could safely observe that which lies outside of its material capacity to enclose. Most importantly, this was accomplished using space as its substance. Architecture has always expressed as much about the life of its inhabitants, their ways of life –the interior of the edifice, as it has about their relationship to the world outside those walls –the exterior. [...]
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