"Smooth space" for avatars: a proun in the metaverse

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-8679-3.ch003

During the years of Suprematism, between 1919 and 1923 in Russia, one of the movement's most significant contributors, architect, artist and designer El Lissitzky developed a series of works which he entitled "Prouns," a name the exact meaning of which El Lissitzky never fully revealed, although he later described the purpose of his creations as interchange stations from painting to architecture, i.e., from two dimensional to three dimensional visuality. The author has re-created El Lissitzky's "Proun #5A" from 1919 in the metaverse, as an architecture for avatars. The process in which the translation from analogue drawing to three dimensional digital artifact was undertaken, the challenges encountered during its re-building; framed within a literature review that examines both El Lissitzky's influence on contemporary cyber-architecture, as well as the significance of his spatial investigations and his sources of inspiration during the early decades of the twentieth century will form the contents of this text.