A Purple Architecture

A Purple Architecture is an edited collection of essays and projects investigating Purpleness as a quality independent from the assumed virtual/physical, material/immaterial, mediated/immediate dualities. Purpleness thus serves as a theoretical framework to investigate the impacts of technological mediation in developing possible spatial scenarios through storytelling.

The centuries-old topic of how to represent reality, and subsequently how to supplant it, was catapulted into Western popular culture through the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which the protagonist is faced with a choice between taking a blue pill or the red pill. One keeps him in simulation, and the other confronts him with reality. A Purple Architecture questions the assumption that these two parallel conditions are mutually exclusive. In the context of this volume, the purple pill is not reduced to an in-between hybrid liminal condition. Purpleness is also as ontologically autonomous (and gradient) as any other color on or off the electromagnetic spectrum of light.