Andreea Ion CojoCaru is a unique blend of VR developer and practicing architect in both virtual and physical spaces, but who is also driven by deep philosophical questions and her own embodied curiosities exploring the boundaries between the virtual and the physical. These embodied experiences in virtual reality have actually catalyzed a pretty significant paradigm shift in CojoCaru's own philosophical thinking. I first met CojoCaru at VR Now in Germany in 2018 in a serendipitous collision that led to a deep dive discussion into the phenomenology of architecture. We then crossed paths again in London for the Immersive Architecture of the Internet Symposium organized by Space Popular where she was talking about using VR to hack her sensory perceptions. During the pandemic, I invited CojoCaru to participate in a discussion unpacking the immersive architecture of Valve's Half-Life: Alyx.



By the time I had a chance to catch up with her CojoCaru again at SXSW in 2023, it had been nearly three years since we last did a deep dive in anything. I had sent her a conversation about Process Philosophy with Matt Segall at the end of 2020, and again with Grant Maxwell covering 13 process-relational philosophers in 2021, and passed along my recent discussion with Segall about his upcoming book unpacking an organic view of reality and contextualizing Whitehead's and Schelling's Process Philosophy with Kant as a guardian of the epistemological threshold. What's striking about this is that while she was not very receptive to this process-relational mode of thinking through the podcast medium of philosophical discourse, she was actually in the process of her own philosophical paradigm shift towards Eastern philosophy via Orthodox Hinduism and process-relational thinking catalyzed from her own embodied experiences of VR and completely independent of these other conversations.



In the process of working on this concept of an open source city project called Spectra Cities, which she announced on March 7 as having received a 2 million Euro grantb where here design shop of numena will "work on behavioral analysis & participatory design using VR +Spectra Cities." CojoCaru has been also deeply inspired by Stanislavski's system of improve and has been translating her architectural and spatial design process into a piece of embodied performance not only for herself, but for others as well. It's through this more dynamic and participatory relationship to a more fluid and "rubbery" experience of architectural forms that she started to search for an alternative metaphysical grounding that went beyond Mel Slater's "presence as illusionary framing" that Chalmers argues against in his book Reality+. She started to find some deep inspiration from the Vedantas, but was also still in the sensemaking process for how to more fully contextualize this more dynamic and relational dimension of design that goes beyond the more static framing of Western substance metaphysics.



On March 5th, CojoCaru had privately expressed some skepticism towards my claims in my two conversations with Segall that embodied VR experiences could start to catalyze a philosophical paradigm shift towards process-relational thinking. But by the time I had a chance to speak with her on March 14th at SXSW, she had the sudden realization during this conversation that she herself had in fact gone through a radical philosophical transformation towards a more process-relational mode of thinking that was catalyzed by her embodied experiences within VR.



Then in this conversation we decide to coin the term "process-relational architecture" to describe this interactive, dynamic, improvisational, performative, and participatory design process that's she's been doing with virtual architecture. So rather than focus on the materiality of substance as a static metaphysical foundation, then process-relational metaphysics that I think this passage from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy enca...