Ilgın Hancıoğlu

In 2012 I attendent a student conference as a speechgiver in the University Sint-Lucas in Brussels, Belgium. Here you can read my final abstract.

Constructing  A Virtual World

Ilgın Hancıoglu

People have the ability to arrange the borders of their own environment via high speed transportation vehicles and virtual worlds they tend to live in.

With high speed transportation vehicles, distance gained another meaning. With the consciousness of the option not spending much time on the road, our speed increases, and we barely experience the environments we pass through.

Virtual world can be simplified as “the world inside the screen”.  The screen creates a foreign environment inside the environment it is nested and enlarges our living rooms as it shows us the places we would probably never go and see on our own. However these images cannot be intervened / involved.  “Videogames” on the other hand, can be considered as the interactive versions of TV shows. User can be deeply rooted in the videogame’s atmosphere and “live” in an environment that he or she chooses. But TV world and videogames involve a really small part of the virtual world.

In the broadest definition, “virtual world” can be considered as an extra layer on top of our world, we cannot see it surrounding us, (at least without some filters) but it does. Cloud computing, market barcodes, Nano technology, radioactivity, Bluetooth or QR codes are the members of the world surrounding us invisibly. They help us store or spread information; at this point, “virtual world” shares the definition of “networks”.  Networks also collect and distribute knowledge, and they can be found everywhere, our telephone book, our genetic algorithms, military operations may all be considered as networks. With collecting and distributing knowledge, networks can define invisible social spaces. The best example of the virtual social space may be the internet. The internet weights as much as a strawberry but it contains the most data in the world. We take place inside the internet as virtual identities and communicate with other identities.

There are plenty of projects developed with this question. One of them is Jürgen Mayer-Hermann’s A.way. In A.way people not just transport but wander the city with their cars, and the car works as a filter that shows the user’s needs in a digitalized urban environment  where all the information is interconnected. Driver experience a personalized city.  

At this point a lot of thoughts flow into one’s mind. Like a “Knowledge Shower” that transports and distributes knowledge, much or less like the internet but the aim is to connect people. But not quite the same way Facebook or Wikipedia does. People don’t upload their information and hope that it would be read. Direct communication is used between individuals. One does not register into the network with personal ID. The virtual ID is given at birth, just like identity card. The information of the individual’s eliminated from some filters, reaches common network refers to public space, then distributes to the others if needed. People in the network can take part on the communication collective work. Persons can determine the subjects they want to discus, and the network can find them the space. The discussion spaces are highlighted in the urban landscape and the streets also publicize these discussion events. Like billboards in some parts of the city, little communication islands can be installed. The participants don’t have to be professionals in their subjects; they are everyday life people that discuss about things. The subject may be contemporary politics, or kitty litter. Just like ancient world agoras creating people space to discuss about problems, a modern interface for agoras created, arranged, distributed via networks.