Fooling ourselves : topics and design strategies for media architecture, integrated media, and composite reality

Abstract

The rapid expansion of new media technologies is exacerbating inherent flaws embedded in the common multimedia display, or screen. As of 2015 the average American spends more time perceptually engaged with virtual content via screens than with the real world, with adverse effects. The current landscape of engagement with the virtual world, and virtual engagement with each other has lead to increased mediation, isolation, and dissociation that threatens how society functions. To counteract this trend, we should be making more of an effort to integrate the virtual into our natural, shared environment, and to create multimedia experiences that physically bring people together. Architecture is particularly well situated to tackle the integration of the virtual into the built environment. Such an endeavor constitutes a new subcategory of architecture: media architecture, which synthesizes physical design, content design, and communication theory. This subject matter is explored with the aid of various video based experimentations and artistic explorations. As a result of these experiments and explorations this thesis also proposes a number of design strategies for creating integrated media, including a materialist approach for creating virtual content that is more tethered to reality. Throughout, this thesis seeks to interrogate the eternal rift between the world in our heads, and the world in which we find ourselves, between imagination and reality.