Here's a quote from Norman that might help us define our Parallel World project space- a scripted space within a context of a new canon- or 'anti-canon.'
"In effect, the history of the last fifty years is increasingly
about the crisis in representing space, from conceptual space to
virtual space to cyberspace to cinematic space to public space to
intimate space/identity. And the era when these Scripted Spaces,
these narratized, themed illusions began to take over begins around
1955. And not only in the fine arts, of course, also in architecture,
in urban planning, in themed environments. And finally, in media
environments - directly into the internet, games, media art. At last,
we begin to see the new canon emerging, for as surely as the stock
market opens every Monday, a canon must emerge in the art world.
Even if it is an anti-canon. But is it an anti-canon really? Instead
of abstraction, we have the ironic staging of space. Instead of
Enlightenment traditions of ontological real, we have Artifice, the
art of the handmade illusionistic space.
And even museums are being redesigned, reinvented as cultural tourism.
Space is problematical, an allegory for global madness, a soothing
journey into a sublime nowhere, a re-enactment of the invasion of the
self by entertainment, which stands in for global economic authority.
The canon then will be more architectonic, more about themed illusion,
trace the end of irony, let us say, from Pop into hyperbolic home
entertainment. Both Pop and Minimalism are potential points of origin,
not the post-modern moment, but rather a post-war paradigm as starting
point."
Here's the whole interview-
