Re-building a Proun in the metaverse; that is, as a virtual three dimensional architecture appears to be a question of capturing what Marcos Novak calls the materially immaterial that comes about as a construct of shifting, contradictory perspectives and components in which the inhabitant avatar's position reigns over the experience; an attempt at building an interchange station that embodies a shift from painting to architecture; or indeed even a reversal of El Lissitzky's original premise - a shift from architecture back to painting. In this case this can be said to be a three dimensionally inhabitable painting with which I tried to replicate El Lissitzky's architectural drawing or painterly proposition as exactly
as I possibly could.
El Lissitzky had created a number of drawings of the construct from multiple viewpoints. When I started (re)building the construct in the metaverse however, it soon became evident that neither the placement of the components or indeed their actual presence in the drawings corresponded to one another: What was there in one drawing was missing in another, and even more intriguing was that oftentimes what appeared to be a straight line from one aspect became a curve in another. The central room, which was present in all of them, turned out to be a huge challenge in and of itself since although it looked like a 90 degree cube in the drawings, when I tried to re-build what I saw I found out that the only way in which I could fit this central element into what surrounded it was to turn it into an irregular trapezoid prism. The more I looked at the drawings and the more I brought together their components in the metaverse the more I realized that what Lee considers El Lissitzky to have intended was what I was in fact experiencing - a loss of direction, a sense of duality, of being not only one, but instead multiple observers in perpetual motion. Or as El Lissitzky himself wrote: "...the Proun ceases to exist as such and becomes a building surveyed from every direction. The result of this turns out to be the destruction of the single axis that leads to the horizon. Revolving, we are screwed into space. We imparted motion to the Proun, deriving a host of projective axes thereby — we stand between them and displace them."