The Fabric of Civic Teleportation 2021

As digital media gains a third dimension through immersive technology, our cultural, political and experiential understanding of how we access and navigate spaces is challenged. The coming 15 years will see the weaving of physical and virtual environments become denser as our scrolls turn into strolls, and our cursor grows into our full-body avatar. 

Rather than swap pages when we switch tabs or click a link, we replace the entire environment around us. The speed and manner in which these shifts happen, as well as the gesture that triggers them, are at once the affordance and infrastructure for accessing and navigating the virtual environment. In the coming 15 years we must create a civic infrastructure for virtual teleportation that breaks with the discriminatory and opaque nature of locked doors, hidden vigilance, privacy breaches and concealed discrimination. 

Commonly referred to as portals, one of the most popular means to switch from one environment to another are door-like or hole-like thresholds that grant us entrance into another virtual environment of any kind and size. Such travelling devices have existed for centuries in oral history, literature, film, gaming, and naturally now in immersive media. The portal provides a familiar means to link environments that would otherwise be completely incomprehensible to us. 

The contrast that comes from opening a door from the living room into outer space is thrilling but yet coherent thanks to the familiarity of opening a door and crossing its threshold. When we cross a portal we build imaginary walls around the environments we are shifting between, no matter how vast they were, constructing a notion of the overall map that resembles a matrix of interconnected rooms (using here Robin Evans’ term from his essay Figures, Doors and Passages). This recognisable notion makes the experience readable, relatable, and therefore meaningful. 

Virtual environments are, however, currently existing within centralised platforms that create isolated islands – or, shall we say, fortresses. Some platforms have better solutions than others in providing the means to teleport between environments contained within. Now, moving from one platform to another is a whole other journey that often takes us through some kind of app store where we are meant to scroll through browser-like interfaces in virtual displays floating around us. Once we press on one, after possibly a few prompts and some darkness, we are in the new place. 

This brings up the main issues we are concerned with. Firstly, the fact that most immersive environments are currently contained within several layers of commercially driven platforms (it must be mentioned that there are promising open source initiatives such as Hubs by Mozilla); and secondly, the instability and unreliability conveyed by the means of access (you may not be granted access and never know why, or the environment might switch off as a result of something completely out of your control). 

The means of teleportation across the virtual environment must eventually become a coherent protocol: a three-dimensional version of the hyperlink in the form of a portal that at once grants access to an environment as well as the necessary information about it. Such infrastructure must exist outside private or commercial entities and be of civic character: a public and open protocol that weaves together environments into a virtual urban fabric, the fabric of civic teleportation.