Doors of Perception 2 Conference Day-By-Day ...The first day: Friday 4 November

Conference Report: Friday

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Friday morning 4 November 1994

Director of the Netherlands Design Institute, John Thackara, welcomed 1100 attendees to the second Doors of Perception conference. Three days of both intellectual and entertaining high level talks and discussions were to follow. John Thackara looked back on the situation at the Design Institute and Mediamatic a year earlier, when they discussed whether buns for the expected 150 attendees at Doors 1 were to be provided by a catering service or made at home...

In his opening address Thackara expressed his concern that the conceptualization of home in information technology would only lead to toy town if designers, artists and business would not join in serious efforts to provide content and context. The Institute's Doors of Perception programme is directed at just that, and the yearly conference marks its progress.

[John Thackara, right, waiting politely till John Barlow is finished so he can finally hand him a copy of his favourite magazine...]

Keynote speaker John Perry Barlow introduced his move from ranch to Powerbook in a personal and engaging talk called :"My Daddy is Homeless...". His idea of community as a mental and spiritual ecology provided a reference point that several speakers responded to.

MIT MediaLab's Amy Bruckman introduced the Internet as a place where experts should provide context for users to build in and on -- to design not empty scenery, but a context conducive to a desired type of human activity. To design for interaction. Evaluating MediaMOO and the recently developed MOOSE Crossing (a MUD designed to be a learning environment for children, helping them to develop a more authentic relationship to reading, writing and programming), Amy Bruckman touched on the core of what interactivity is going to be at for the coming period: real time multi-user many-to-many communication -- which could be either text based, or graphical, if only these two options are valued for their own specific qualities.

Multi-disciplinary designers Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne closed the first morning's sessions with the presentation of their design practice, which is directed at the development of home as poetic inhabitation. Their work is based on the assumption that aesthetics and poetry should not be separated from everyday living. This can be seen in the Fields and Thresholds project (supported by the Design Institute), which explored telecommunicative and behavioural possibilities within a specific location.

During lunch, Louis Rossetto proudly presents the latest issue of Wired to unsuspecting table company Limburg (left) and Perry (right)

Friday afternoon

session kicked of with Philip Tabor's Striking Home: the Telematic Assault on Identity. His well researched and witty introduction of light as a medium full of significant information, from Dutch Golden Age painting, via stained-glass windows to active matrix colour, inadvertently warmed up the audience for Stephen Perrella's hypnotic performance-like account of `encultured hypersurface' architecture. Stephen Perrella's Hypersurface being an "...enterweaving of Being and Home that is neither inside nor outside and yet both simultaneously..." left the audience very much divided between total interest and total disbelief, as would the other architect, later this afternoon.

Anarchic sufi and author of pseudonymous counter-cultural pamphlets, as well as academic texts on Persian poetry Peter Lamborn Wilson told the conference other stories of home, as Virtual Enclosure -- from the "...ordinary to the point of ugliness...", to the "...Revolution of Everyday Life as a re-imagining of Home ". His spiritual tone enchanted the connoisseurs of home conceptualization, without hiding the subtle humour of his paper for a general audience.

In the last session of the first day, architecture's classic advocate of client participation and Center for Environmental Structure's first man Christopher Alexander presented his life-long focus on Domestic Architecture at the service of well-being. Long silences paced his presentation, which was illustrated with family snapshots and equally intimate pictures of realized building projects for private clients. Like Stephen Perrella's talk, his presentation deeply devided the audience. Alas -- and specifically to the frustration of Perrella, who is as opposed to Alexander's ideas, as one may well imagine -- the planned panel discussion was canceled due to a lack of time.

(During Friday night's reception, discussion does take place. Here, Kristi van Riet is challenging Shin-ichi Takemura. In the middle: an unidentified angry man...)

Pictures on this page by Wendela Smit

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Last updated: 26 jan 1995