The 'liquid space' project is based on the technological and conceptual work of the 'space navigable music' platform, a 3D engine; we have been developing since two years. The development is based on the principle of integrating different media (text, image, sound and space) in a structural, programmed manner, inside and through electronic space navigation. An environment where the performer navigates his created 3D space to compose music in real time, displayed in a 360° projection system and a quadraphonic sound system. The project thus focuses on a parametric setting of spatial, temporal and sonic data and the way we can perceive and interact with these data. For example the location of a sound inside the 3D space defines the way the sound is spatialised through the quadraphonic device, here the distance in-between the sound sources defines the temporal structure of the music. In this parametric setting, distance and space become time, and composing inside the electronic space becomes equal to building a navigable sound architecture. In this manner the different assignments in-between spatial and sonic data set up a system of interrelated codes. This mapping of one media into another allows generating new forms of music, the way we perceive and interact with it, inside the electronic space and how we diffuse it for the public inside physical space through the spatialised visual, 360° projection and the spatialised quadraphonic sound.

Based on these developments, in collaboration with the Nabi Art Center, we have set up the workshop and performance and have invited ten Korean visual and audio artists to organise liquid-space01. In this manner the project was based on a specific conceptual approach 'liquid' framing the collaboration with the Korean artist but also allowing a wider viewpoint on the theoretic and technical development we pursue. Here the proposed concept of 'liquid' by Suhjung Hur from the Curatorial Team of Nabi Art Center was directly related to Marcos Novak's theories, and its declinations exploring the multiple transformation of space through IC technologies, so to mention: trans.disciplinarity - trans.culture - trans.media...

In conclusion, in the 'liquid space' project the major focus was based on the parametric setting in between media, and how out of this information mapping new spatial constructs emerge. Here the use of digital technologies was proposed to enlarge the notion of space in its semantic and cultural connotations.

For us the final quest in these different projects is to make different experiences in the way we can think and construct this rhizomatic reality, the architecture of this networked and electronic space/society, we are getting more and more into. As drawn above through this parametric settings several media merge into a 'hypermedia', digital data which becomes transmittable, storable and computable. In this manner these inFORMation processes extend the way of thinking architectural constructs, the way we perceive and interact not only within all these different space strata's but the entire environment including all its social, economic...patterns.

Concretely speaking, in the "space navigable music" project the different processual and systemic set up allow us to think about new forms of conceiving and producing music and to create performative networked spaces. It is a research about a media-specific way to think music and architecture where its interconnection through networks and multi-user extensions could even lead to new structures of music production ' online music studio / label ' and its diffusion ' 3D online music where the user navigate space to listen and to see ' but also in a more collective form ' online concerts'. This huge range of possibilities extends not only the way to think about music but also incorporates new architectural spaces, hybrids in-between physical, electronic and networked spaces. In conclusion the project on a theoretic and practical level not only allows us to construct these different spaces but to experience new alternative economic, social and cultural forms IC technologies shape all around us. It is an architectural quest to construct these networked realities, only we had to learn to make a step away from this obsession to built in 'stones', to open for new forms of constructing 'signforms' combining all these space strata in one unique coherent system.

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The 'space navigable music' project covers a wide range of researches, from software to hardware developments, in order to explore the perceptive and cognitive modalities of communication and computation technologies and their specific setting of codes and signs. To draw another example on the way we conceive these hypermedia and parametric environments: we recently built up a voice recognition system, allowing through voice instructions not only to navigate the 3D space but to create entirely its sonic and spatial structure in real time. In this manner each time the user pronounces a word he places an object and/or a sound inside the 3D space. In this manner through his/her voice he/she transforms the empty black space into an entire navigable sonic, visual and spatial construct, rendered in quadraphonic and in a 360° projection.

To develop such a device different steps had to be undertaken, different parameters to be crossed. For example which word creates what kind of object and sound, which kind of words are used to generate objects or sounds and which ones will be used for navigation...e.t.c. Here an entire language combining the logics of programming with different cultural, technological codes of the employed media to construct in real time not only the electronic space but the entire performative space, where the artist as the public get immersed in the spatial phonetics of navigable music.

This parametric approach of combining the codes of different media and to display them in a coherent spatial manner has its founding in the research of a language proper to 'hypermedia' and to construct out of it an experience based on its specific modalities of perception and cognition. Like any media it shapes through these modalities psychic and physiologic patterns. Just compare it to cinema, where the camera and montage techniques have built its language and where the black box with its frontal viewpoint has become the space of the audience's emotional, sensitive realm. In this case the cinematic language has turned into a social, cultural interface affecting each of us. In conclusion our research is based on the language of the digital media to construct this cultural interface, this realm.

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As mentioned before the major focus of the project is the parametric setting in-between different codes combing different media and to display them in a coherent spatial manner. In the 'liquid space' project the invited visual and sound artists compose in and through electronic space their navigable music. This spatial logic through which they conceive and perform their compositions thus combines sonic, visual, textual codes. To diffuse these spatial compositions in a spatial logic is more than evidence; it immerses the audience in the same setting. For example a sound object which appears at the rear screen is diffused at the rear speaker..., thus the spatial structure of the composition becomes visible. For both the audience and the performer, these sonic and visual principles build a spatial experience linking the structure of the electronic space to the one of the body, the physical space. In this manner representation is directly link to experience forming a spatial notation system, a sound map...all in one.

In the work around this construction of a 'performative' space ' time ' is the major parameter extending the above-mentioned spatial logics to the one of navigation, and the one of composing into playing music. The performing of music through and inside space, navigation, forms in fact a cinematic construct of space-time. In any 3d environment the user viewpoint is in fact a camera viewpoint where different movements inside this space correspond to different camera techniques, turning is a rotating camera, slide a traveling... and a jump is a cut. Throughout these different cinematic constructs music is performed, a moment where the composed files turns into a spatial instrument which the performer navigates in real time, cutting and sampling music and space in a non-linear space-time matrix. This principle of real time navigation adds to immersion the one of interactivity.

According to this specific setting all the different developments undertaken, such as the voice recognition system, focus on real-time interactivity. This setting performs on the level of artistic action as on the level of audience participation, its understanding and anticipation in the ongoing inter-actions. This performative construct, merging the perceptive and cognitive modalities of electronic and physical space into a immersive experience, needs a strict language based on the codes of the media we employ and the way we display them. Therefore our parametric approach not only determines coding but our entire DeSIGN.

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To answer this question we first have to agree on a certain definition of architecture. From our point of view architecture and urbanism are structural and functional disciplines involved in the spatial and temporal organization of social, economic, political...structures through which they also constitute a semantic system of signs and codes. All these aspects define them as organizational disciplines that process, analyse and structure data within spatial constructs while improving it with a specific significance - meaning.

Seen from this point of view a public library for example is more than a place to access information - it represents and structure knowledge according to the way we produce and share knowledge. On this level it reflects and produces cultural, social ...codes.

Defining architecture and urbanism in such terms implies to understand these disciplines in a much broader field than just the one of 'concrete' questions of physical building; it is based on architectural thinking in the production of spatial artefacts. Here IC technologies have entirely changed the way we have to think about space, its organisation and representation, architecture so to speak. Technology based on the transmission and computation of information influences organization models (modes of production, work and knowledge) and affects the communication process (code, symbol) and the social relations as well as their spatialisation. To compare it with the example of a public library: in networks we represent knowledge to be accessed - it represents shared knowledge, - an informational value, it reflects cultural flows inside new spatial constructs. Here structuring data is based on the same questions as on its built counterpart, only the matter has changed. Now the structuring of information in visual, graphic, spatial representation has turn in the organisation of informational flows. In short maybe the public library of tomorrow is a browser displayed on a screen or any other device. But the objective stays the same, how through the structuring data, cultural, social...structures are processed - and knowledge represented, shared and produced. Of course IC technologies, as any media, enlarge the possibilities to think about these structures, processes and systems to a point where we as architects can't apply anymore traditional architectural methods.

Maybe two recent projects we have been working on will allow us to shape a better understanding of the impact of IC technologies on architectural thinking _ or not; depending once again on the viewpoint you take. We recently have been invited for a workshop of the Dutch architectural school, TU-Delft, to reflect about the landscapes the car all over the planet shapes and how we conceive this ' driving perception '.

But what is the state of design when the car itself changes, becoming not only a 1tonne container in a traffic jam but a node in a network, permanently displaying data on the drivers display, a communication infrastructure adding to mobility the question of connectivity ? Will this state lead to such a radical reshaping of the urban landscape as the industrial car did 100 years before? What is the place of architecture inside this development? Can architects take part in this shaping of the data landscape or will architecture as it did according to the industrial landscape of the car once again fail, being a by-product ?

We have been contacted by a famous French car producer to think about what kind of spatial data can be displayed in a car and in which way the driver can interact with these info-highways and environments, the request was for us the expression of the way we have to think nowadays about architecture: the car as communication infrastructure interconnected to the data landscape entirely shaping our perception of space based on these cognitive extensions. Here space is a media and architecture its transmitter.

The other example is the conception of an exhibition pavilion for the European Commission for the ITU World 2003 fairy in Geneva. Here the commissioner's request was to set up a building being more than a spatial envelope but an entire communication structure. A 'global concept' for an interactive building, seen from the external as the internal view point, linking each architectural element and sign to the desktop interface a user will consult, interact. The project conception thus focused on the use and the implication of the visitor within technology rather than its illustration in order to communicate the main topics of the European politics according to IC technologies. The development of such a communication infrastructure can't be undertaken differently than through a transdisciplinary approach, it overcomes the traditional conception of architecture. In this project the structuring of data for the 3D interface we developed, has become as important as the structure of the building itself, it had to become one. So according to your question, how IC technologies transform architectural space, in this example the question was: how to build a hypertext and its related codes? - or the other way around - how spatial constructs are related to structuring data and its processes?

When we still want architecture to be part of the production of social and cultural artefacts we can no longer conceive architecture without taking information processes, communication and computation, in account when conceiving spatial and semantic constructs. Yet you may think the understanding of architecture as a media is not such a new concept. From Bauhaus experimental stage design, to Corbusier's Philips Pavilion for the world exhibition in 1958, le poème électronique, to N.Schöffers cybernetic architecture...many architects have founded their work in the technological progress as a vector of cultural, social....processes. But as the quoted examples already show, the question of space, its perception and understanding is not only an architectural question. Other disciplines explore the way we perceive, conceive and interact with spatial data. Therefore in our collaborative agency we develop a transdisciplinary approach in order to experiment the parameters we can conceive the space of today, this rhizomatic reality, shaped out of the data we communicate and compute. In short, architecture stays architecture, but maybe we only have to understand it in a different way, many did before and turned back on a more fundamental research about the flows and processes which shape out time.

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The concept of MetaDeSIGN is based on the conviction that the technologies which surround us are not external or alienating objects but that they entirely take part of our sensorial, perceptive and cognitive apparatus. From this point of view the work on the definition of a discipline based on the specificities of communication and computation technologies, MetaDeSIGN, is the result of long ongoing reflections and experimentations in a theoretic and practical work on our understanding and perception of space and the transformation induced by IC technologies.

Etymology can help you understand the term MetaDeSIGN . It combines two notions: the one of Meta and the one of Design, both very connoted as much in the field of computer science as in architecture. In computer science ' Meta ' describes the type of information necessary to instruct any kind of communication or computation process, it defines as well its spatial, morphologic or semantic parameters. Thus it defines the way binary data is processed into textual, graphic...information. In short it describes an upper hierarchy of information; it is information about information. In this manner the use of the word 'Meta' in the definition of a methodological approach focuses on the parameters of information structures, processes and systems, its architecture.

Whereas the use of the term ' deSIGN ' besides its Latin definition 'signare', to distinguish by a sign, is more based on its cultural and historic meaning. During the Bauhaus period, El Lissitzky was employing the term to identify and to found a new artistic approach according to the machine age. But rather than being a pure esthetic reflection it was founded on the necessity to rearticulate artistic practice according to the social, political... technological transformations, in this case industrialization progresses. A situation which has many similarities to our present necessities, isn't it?

The combination of both words in one single construct thus relates to its technological, semantic and cultural understanding and reflects our contemporary state in the production of cultural artifacts. According to this reading Metadesign, can be defined as a practice grounded on the inherent logics of computation and communication technologies in the visualisation and formalisation of inFORMation processes in textual, graphical, spatial constructs. As a discipline MetaDesign is about the setting of codes / language drawn from concepts of communication and information sciences - cognitive science with that of process methods _ design and spatial constructs _ architecture.

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