SOCIAL SPACE:

A multi-user vrml social space for participants. This space runs the complete length of the Panopticon structure, giving equal access to all levels/modules. This space is one of the two places that are based on actual buildings. Barrels Hall in Ullenhall, Warwickshire has a particular resonance for the Panopticon Project.

The literary social circle that established itself at Barrels Halls, although primarily noted for its romantic and Pastoral output which idealised the peaceful and simple lifestyle of country folk, was preoccupied by the revolutionary changes that were evolving in this period. Australia was 'discovered', America declared its independence, and the seeds of the Nineteenth industrial revolution were germinating. This small village in Ullenhall became the spiritual home of writers who were slowly coming to terms with significant changes advances in science and engineering were having on human consciousness. The search for new metaphors to articulate and comprehend the human condition can be seen in embryonic form emerging from beneath a rich tapestry of a wealthy and spoilt lifestyle.

Ullenhall, which lies west of Henley-in-Arden, was made a separate ecclesiastical parish on 27 June 1861. Barrels Hall and its wooded estate was bought by Robert Knight, Lord Luxborough (latter Earl Catherlough), in 1730. From 1739-1756 Henrietta, Lady Luxborough (1699-1756) lived (confined) there, separated from her husband following a legal battle that effectively placed her under house arrest, limiting her movements and banning her from entering London. She made Barrels Hall a centre of a literary circle for poets and writers such as the poets Shenstone, Somerville, Jago of Beaudesert, and Richard Graves. Henrietta obsession with her literary circle was noticeably eccentric. Lady Huntingdon described Henrietta as, "so odd and so engrossed with her poets and literary acquaintances' that she had 'neither time nor attention to spare for that which' concerned Ôher never dying soul."
(Williams, 1946).

Barrels Hall was nearly burnt to the ground in 1933 and remains a ruin, which is being slowly reabsorbed into the wooded undergrowth. The Barrels Hall recreated in the Panopticon recalls HenriettaÕs period of exile and the literary enquiry that still haunts the buildings ruins.

Descriptions of barrels Hall taken from Marjorie Williams account of Lady Luxborough Goes to Bath: pp 49-50: "Lady Luxborough told Mr. And Mrs. Graves that she had planted flowering shrubs at Barrels and Ômade an aviary and filled it with a variety of singing birds', and had made 'a fountain in the middle of it and a grotto to sit and hear them sing in. ThisÉ seen from every window in the house' afforded 'some amusement. And in a coppice a little further' she had 'made a lovely cave shaded by trees'. She talked of her new gardener, Hume, a Scot, and said he had fenced in her 'Service-Tree Walk' from sheep, and had contrived to keep other intruders out of it by a ha-ha and high bank'."

Barrels Hall marks the starting point for the architecture of this social space. The occupants will ultimately model this social space. Using ftp, models created by participants will slowly replace the Barrels Hall architecture. Traces of the original architecture and the activities of the inhabitants will be stored within the library, leaving the virtual Barrels hall in a similar ruined and memory laden state to the real version.