Liquid Architectures...

I'm in a familiar place. Have I been here before? I feel I know this place, yet even as I turn something appears to have changed. It is still the same place, but not quite identical to what it was just a moment ago. Like a new performance of an old symphony, its intonation is different, and in the difference between its present and past incarnations something new has been said in a language too subtle for words. Objects and situations that were once thought to have a fixed identity, a generic "self", now possess personality, flow and flavor. All permanent categories are defeated as the richness of the particular impresses upon me that in this landscape, if I am to benefit fully, attention is both required and rewarding. Those of us who have felt the difference nod to each other in silent aknowledgement, knowing that at the end of specificity lies silence, and what is made speaks for itself, not in words, but in presences, ever changing, liquid...

Liquid architectures in cyberspace 

Marcos Novak

Information Landscapes (Muriel Cooper)

"Electronic is malleable. Print is rigid," 

she told me, then backtracked in characteristic fashion. "I guess I'm never sure that print is truly linear: it's more a simultaneous medium. Designers know a lot about how to control perception, how to present information in some way that helps you find what you need, or what it is they think you nee. Information is only useful when it can be understood."

The primary mission of the VLW is to develop devices and design strategies for manipulating information under constantly changing conditions. Underlying many of these "computationally expressive tools" (to quote the somewhat cumbersome VLW-speak) are the concepts of transparency, adaptability, and blur. Translated into everyday language, these terms imply, respectively, that 1) you can see right through the data, as if it were printed on glass, to sequential layers behind; 2) that if there's a change in back ground color in a dynamic environment, the type "knows" to adjust its own hue so as to remain legible against it; and 3) that fuzzy fields of information come into focus, and therefore become readable, as you approach them.

in aiga.org