ChronoMnemos

Historically an abyss divides the two modalities of our experience, the sacred or the "real" and the "profane" or the neutral. Sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by humans in the course of their evolution. In the last analysis, the sacred and the profane modes of being depend on the different positions that men and women have come to occupy in the cosmos.

This abyss becomes more apparent when we describe real space and the rituals which attend its human habitation. I believe that for most of us space is not homogeneous; it has breaks and differing qualities. There are multiple references in cultures past and present to holy ground, forbidden territories and "other" realms. This sense of real space is opposed or contrasted with all other space, the formless expanse around it. It is a primary tenet of mystical or spiritual experience that a manifestation of real space is a demonstration of an absolute reality, that is, the manifestation of real space ontologically founds the world.

The experience of neutral space is homogeneous; no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass. Geometrically defined spaces, such as those we create in virtual reality, can be cut, delimited and navigated in any direction; but no qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation is given by virtue of its inherent structure. This principle is the key to understanding ChronoMnemos. In the homogenous and infinite expanse of neutral space, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, real space reveals an absolute fixed point or center. The discovery or projection of a fixed point is equivalent to the creation of the world.

Revelation of real space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation, or to "create a world", within the context of homogenous space. Since an experience of neutral space does not allow for a fixed point of reference no unique ontological status can be ascribed to it; it appears and disappears in accordance with our momentary needs. In a way, there is no longer a world but rather a series of related but disjointed fragments of infinite number and variety. This leads us to the identification of one of the more glaring omissions in the majority of virtual worlds, the sense of presence accompanied by an absence of place. In most virtual spaces we find the author's primary focus to be the suspension of disbelief, moving inexorably toward a photo realistic simulacra of increasing refinement. I call it the Reality Replacement Project, something which has at its core the coercion of the guest to insert every day life expectations into a seamless system of objects and neutral spaces. It is the classic epistemological impasse, if we create an artificial world that passes for the everyday, homogeneous world, have we expanded that world to meet our needs or have we altered our needs suit the demands of the virtual world? Of course, this depends on how we re-define our concepts of humanity in the age of information. Will we continue to value ourselves on the basis of chess games and Turing Tests?

These questions go to the core of ChronoMnemos and its specific intention to illustrate the principle which states that without a sense of orientation in time, no world can be created, hence no special sense is conveyed. Each of us has an inherent understanding of this through the persistence of memories and dreams. A childhood incident, a special graveyard, an erotic fantasy...each evokes a sensation which calls a halt to the neutral world. It is this discovery of a single point, this creation of a world, which transforms our consciousness.

Since virtual worlds are for all intent and purposes unknown and unoccupied territory, they share in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By ritualizing the occupancy of a virtual world we transform it into a cosmos, hence the need for a focusing, referencing point. Here it is interesting to note the adoption the avatar as the convention for the disembodied representation of one's self within a virtual space.

The Chronos Architecture:

After much experimentation, I realized the best way to design and describe this project was to conceive of it as something which would exist in physical reality, that is, to design it as a physical structure. One need only remember that all of ChronoMnemos will exist in a virtual space or spaces.

The ChronoMnemos architecture is comprised of a sundial, noonmark, naked-eye observatory and precession telescope. Its first location has been calibrated to reside in and on the south tower of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Each solar instrument tells time on either an hourly, daily, seasonal or epochal (26,000 year) cycle. The instruments are contained within a 40' x 40' x 80' chamber inside the tower at 150' above grade. The Cathedral was chosen as the initial site for two reasons. The first is its high elevation and south facing orientation which affords a commanding view of its immediate surroundings and a large part of Manhattan. The second is that the Cathedral directors have a history of supporting cultural eccentricities, including an on going program of quasi pagan celebrations on the summer solstice, new music concerts and controversial art exhibitions. I also suspect they are keen to have the south tower filled with something other than roosting pigeons.

ChronoMnemos Floor Plan

ChronoMnemos explores the experience of the spaces, forms, lighting and connecting pathways of an architecture whose primary function is the telling of time. It allows the viewer to experience, amongst others, circadian vs. quartz time, sacred vs. profane orientation, the architectural translation of temporal rhythms and the temporal elongation of a moment of time.

Relative to the Cathedral, the grid of Manhattan represents the categorization of time as discreet mathematical units, a physical manifestation of quartz time. The ChronoMnemos instruments (sundial, noon mark, and naked-eye observatory) all tell time through the daily, seasonal and annual interplay of sunlight and shadow, the physical manifestations of cyclical time.

Cardinal orientation is one of the key indices of real space, a siting tenet which the Cathedral ironically ignores. Oriented to the grid of Manhattan, it misses true east-west by almost 30 degrees. In order for the ChronoMnemos instruments to read time, they must be oriented to the cardinal points. In so doing, the observatory becomes the sole traditionally oriented "sacred" space in the Cathedral and most likely the only one in the City of New York.

In the first phase of ChronoMnemos, a path invites the guest to visit first the sundial, then the noonmark and finally the naked-eye-observatory and precession telescope. In so doing, he or she explores natural cycles of time ranging in periods from a few minutes to 26,000 years.

ChronoMnemos Cross Section

The tower with its naked-eye-observatory and precession telescope occupies the center. To the west, and skewed to the meridian, lies the noonmark with curved glass roof. The glass sheathed sundial is suspended beyond the face of the tower and accessible only by way of the lancet window. One cannot continue beyond the sundial without exiting and then re-entering the Cathedral Tower at 160' above grade.

(image filename = CMnm.jpeg) "ChronoMnemos Noonmark"

Because of the immense scale of the surrounding tower, the sundial is 10' across and 25' high. Its large size makes it readily readable from the avenue below. The hour lines and frame are designed give it a light character while the cantilever floats the whole thing away from the face of the tower. The dial face itself is composed of translucent dichroic glass. The front will glow a dull red while a singular blue light will be projected onto the face of the tower. This moving blue shadow will amplify the scale of the dial and add depth to the experience of the passage of time.

(image filename = CMsd.jpeg) "ChronoMnemos Sundial"

As the moment of noon approaches, the visitor will look up from the inside of the noonmark and see a ball of light, projected from a tiny aperture high on the south wall of the tower, fall on the curved translucent glass roof. Where it falls will depend on the noontime altitude of the sun which, in turn, will depend on the time of year. The ball, actually a camera obscura image of the sun, will progress across the glass roof until, moments before noon, it reaches a band of prismatic glass where it will shatter into a colorful light shards. At the precise moment of noon, the ball of light will disappear into the 6" gap separating the two halves of the structure. The precise moment of solar noon is signaled by the absence of the solar timeball. By pre-calculating the apparent path of the sun across the sky, a virtual sun will correspond to the actual sun's position relative to the site's location.

The noonmark is a structure created by time. Its length is determined by the winter and summer solstice extremes. The structural bays are determined by where the shadow falls on the 21st day of each month. The doorways center precisely where the sunball does on the equinox. Each half of the split building represents a six months journey of the sun, one from the summer solstice out to the winter, and the other the return.

Having explored the hourly and daily time cycles, the guest ascends the observatory tower to explore longer and more contemplative zones. There is only enough room for one observer on the platform at a time, the idea simply being that consciousness is an individual's thoughts about his or her own thoughts. It is a lonely and solitary process which requires a singular sense of space and time.

Standing under the center of the tower dome, one is surrounded by four pairs of columns oriented to the cardinal points. Interspersed between the columns are orb like markers oriented to the horizon point where the sun will rise or set on the solstitial extremes. Normally, such events would be impossible to see from within the stone confines of the Cathedral tower but the incorporation of virtual reality will overcome this limitation.

Suspended at an angle between the north columns is the precession telescope. It directs the eye to the precise location of the north star. While not directly visible from the platform, Polaris, the present day pole star, is visible on a bronze disk which partially intersects the scope. Polaris holds that spot only once every 26,000 years, a period caused by a wobble in the earth's axis. The other north stars in this cycle are also inscribed on the bronze disk. In order to keep the scope locked onto the correct north star, a member of the Cathedral staff will have to rotate the disk one notch every 462 years.

There is another fundamental aspect to this project contained within the second half of the project title, "Mnemos". The special quality of the Chronos architecture is its focus on place. Place is one of the two primary elements in the ancient art of memory training or mnemonics. Keying on our biochronic connection to the sun, it seems that the ability to create strong memory associations within the real space created by the Chronos architecture is plausible. Deeply rooted rhythms and recollections residing in our genetic memory are associated with our earliest attempts at orienting ourselves within space and time. Such a predisposition to archetypal imprinting might facilitate the capacity for guests to create embedded "memory cells". These loci (associated with models, images, sounds, graphics and text) can be broadcast to other guests inhabiting a Chronos-like architecture of their own or left in nooks for others to find. These cells could also act as portals to dynamically exchanged neutral spaces. The research for this phase of ChronoMnemos is only just beginning and will continue to evolve.

If we accept the notion that the revelation of real space requires orientation in order to create a world, once that orientation is achieved it is a simple task to create an active link back to that point. As the guest passes through a memory cell into a neutral space a "return" button will be available to them. He or she will be free to explore these worlds but will be able to return to the ChronoMnemos architecture for spatio-temporal reorientation.

The World Wide Web version of ChronoMnemos will incorporate ideas and technologies derived from Geonet, a project currently funded by the European Economic Commission under the Esprit program. Some of the elements we will include are:

1. Shared animated vector-based graphics.
2. Linked multimedia data and meta-data for "smart stream" media.
3. Location of maps, objects, data and meta-data on a geo-referenced spatial index of the earth.
4. Correlation of data into multi-layered, multi-user, time-series information with global geographic attributes.

All of this will be sewn together by way of an interface which will display and access this spatio-temporal information.

To conclude, ChronoMnemos is a distributed architectural scheme for the direct modulation of virtual time and space using the earth's rotation around the sun as a spatio-temporal reference. On its surface, ChronoMnemos is a virtual environment comprised of several time-telling devices and a path designed to take a guest on a journey towards an actualization of real space. Embedded memory cells leading to homogenous worlds linked to sites incorporating isometric architectural schemes will allow for multiple user interactions. The ability to return to the path within the ChronoMnemos architecture is intrinsic to every linked world.