Chapter 1
A Location Called Cyberspace
«Give me a place to stand and I will move the world» (Archimede)
Necessity of Implacement
Every human being has the necessity of being located in a certain space and time. Space can be a physical location: a room, a theater, a library, or it can exist simply as conceived by the mind. Place is prior to all things and everything is somewhere and in place. The reason of the necessity of ‘implacement’ is that individuals need to interact, to engage in the creation of relations with thing, we need to understand the limits of our sphere within the existence that is around us. Space functions on the base of intrinsic bonds. These bonds give us parameters for our activity of ‘signification’ in the world. We are born in a certain space and time, and we grow up among relations and interactions with both other people and locations we are placed in.
Individuals are immersed in space, from space we obtain all the necessary information not only to build our physical sphere but also our mental one, gaining an image of the world that goes beyond what the sensorial organs communicate. Our life long walk brings us to cross a variety of locations, physical and cultural ones with their own characteristics and relevance. The opportunity or possibility to travel among these environments without ‘violating’ the borderlines, such as without rupture in the continuity of the experience, relies uniquely on our cultural availability, relies on our considerate opinion of the concept of space. In western civilizations the concept of space is dominant, we think of space as an homogenous and isotropic entity, in which the subject moves without breaking the ‘continuity’. Through Henri Lefbvre’s words, in The Production of Space when describing the illusion of transparency[1], space is a ‘luminous’ location, completely intelligible, open to free play of human agency, willfulness and imagination.
If we apply the notion of implacement to Cyberspace we will have a further representation of a cultural process, where components of our ‘natural world’ unite with the ‘generated world’ of Cyberspace. The result will be the creation of a new culture, a ‘shared culture’, where new meanings of both worlds would be placed in each other.[2]
Cyberspace and the images that create the environment, are the reality of the space and if we perceive them as such, their mode of reality, their presence, and participation will contribute to the creation of the spatiality: «... space is an idea that the mind abstracts from matter to explain the simultaneity of things and the displacement of the impenetrable matter. ... There is no space where there is no matter. Space is to matter like the time to movement.»[3]
On a further level Heterotopia[4], Michel Foucault’s concept of space, could be applied to Cyberspace. Heterotopia is an ‘anti-utopia’: if an utopia is a hope without real or adequate location, an Heterotopia is an excess of realization. ‘Heterotopic’ are those locations, just like Cyberspace, that don’t need geographical referrals, they are the locations of ‘passage’, of crisis, and of condensation of experience, they are realities that are based only on themselves. «...they create another space, a real one, that is so perfect, so meticulous, so well furnished to the point that our space appears as not in order, not well laid out, chaotic. It would not be an illusion [that we live in] it would be a compensation. ... It is a place without a place, that lives for itself, that autodesignates itself... that is the biggest tank of imagination.»[5] Foucault defined the ‘boat’ as the Heterotopia ‘par excellence’, being a place without a place, a floating piece of space that exists by itself yet is the greatest reserve of the footloose imagination, floating from port to port, tack to tack, in search for the most precious treasures. In an analogous way I define Cyberspace as a realization of an Heterotopia: Cyberspace is a location without the realistic elements of a location, it is indeed a floating piece of space that exists by itself, being defined as www (World Wide Web) and having a life of its own; most important of all Cyberspace is in its multiple facets and usage the greatest reserve of imagination. The ‘surfer’ of the Internet travels from one location to the other, visiting one ‘homepage’ after the other in a nomadic erratic exploration, connecting, attaching, in search for ‘precious treasures’, for information, for socialization, sharing, learning, feeling, living. Foucault continues his argument on boats stating that in a civilization without boats dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police takes the place of pirates. What would our society be without Cyberspace?[6]
Men need to create new realities within reality, we need to stop believing in a certain ensemble of arguments in order to accept new ones. Cyberspace could realize our capacity to enter in symbolic worlds, moving in an alternative world. When entering Cyberspace our pleasure is in being taken away from our world and transported into another level of reality. Our capacity of immersion in the symbolic element can become so intense that we might not realize the instant when the scenario changes. In order to slide in a symbolic environment we only need a: ‘once upon a time’ or ‘given the variable X’, or a simple ‘click here’.
Implaced in Cyberspace
Cyberspace, is considered to be the reductionist environment ‘par excellence’, where everything is reduced to an image, to an icon, to mere colors and shapes, to binary codes, to dimensions, height, depth and perpendicularity. On the other hand, Cyberspace is conceptually embedded in an intelligent mechanism that exists independently from what is visible. The ‘spatial transparency’ takes on a physical dimension of a new order thanks to the representation of overlapping physical and electronic realities that can now be constructed, observed and experienced.
Digital technology is a language in which for the first time we have the possibility to manipulate, to control and have responsibility over language to create the references we want. By controlling and manipulating the language we create a place, a location, a living space, a social space, even if lacking of any ‘real’ spatial settings. A location that lives of a life of its own, with its details, its folds, peculiarities, a place that doesn’t allow external breathing, it’s captured, we are captured within.
Cyberspace is the result of what once seemed an impossibility: the creation of a space in the electronic frame. But according to Gilles Deleuze, «... impossible ideas from one medium often translate to another, because a creator who is not seized at the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator is someone who creates his own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.»[7] A perceptual understanding, complete with physical experience and comprehension can be created. This phenomena, this experience translates into an awareness of how images function on various levels of the communication scale, creating an architecture that does not only put forward prospects for viewing, but most of all creates spaces of energy, with which the images interfere, so as to gain their own topology in loco. Space is still a necessary place, but architecture can no longer be bound by the static conditions of locally defined place, but as architecture in data space.
Cyberspace is a location with an incredible potential of communication, that demands an entirely new use of language, space and time. It is precisely following Wittgenstein’s belief that language is also a fundamental technology, and not only a vehicle for expressing thought but the driver of thought, that we can consider digital technologies fundamental for the future understanding of space and information.
It is also true that the more we go on in the exploration and fruition of the digital environment the more we, as ‘immersed’ individuals, will demand more advanced technologies, more conceptual abilities to receive and perceive this new language. This kind of information will involve a more physical and psychological immersion into electronic worlds, in the spatiality of ‘sites’ (as in web sites), in the relations of proximity between various points or elements of Cyberspace. (http://www.cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/port).
Space is nowadays what we’re betting on, during this ‘game’ of transmutation that unites the interlacement of the location and the ‘non-location’, the horizon of a third nature appears: the territory of Cyberspace. A third nature or a ‘thirdspace’ beyond the real and the imagined, a meta-space[8] of radical openness, where everything can be found, where the possibility of discovery is endless, where one should always be in movement, on to new sights and insights. A space where everything: the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, come together.
In The Production of Space, Lefebvre explored new dimensions of spatiality, pushing its frontiers beyond the known. His belief was that our concern should be with a space on a world scale, as well as all the spaces subsidiary to it, creating a new process, a new situation in which all places, and spatiality itself, have to undergo a metamorphoses, a radical change and reconstruction. Lefebvre’s knowledge of space, and our ‘acquisition’, ‘assimilation’ of the space called Cyberspace, represents a mean to ‘thread’ through the complexities of the post-modern world/digital world, achievable only through a constant search to move beyond (meta-) what is known, through space, through the production of spatiality, through the creation of the location of Cyberspace.
Sensing the Phenomenon of Space
Spatial realms are the sensible cores around which human beings form their world. Traditionally space has been regarded as a ‘container for’ , or a ‘common characteristic of’, the objects of experience, as the form which makes external experiences possible. Space can be seen either as objective or subjective , either as part of the real world or as a principle of unification ‘in’ the subject of experience. Maurice Merleau -Ponty’s phenomenological approach has revealed that the subject, is an incarnate subjectivity, the subject of experience, rather than a transcendental ego, representing a phenomenal body inseparably bound up with the world. It is obvious at this point that the traditional notion of space will need to be rethought , and that the unity of experience can no longer be considered to lie ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ but must originate in the dynamic relationship between the body and a world, through which its objects and subjects come into being for us.
Once again in Cyberspace we will need to question our established notion of the world and rediscover the actual pre-reflective experience from which it arises. We gear our bodies to the new world in such a way that we experience the former as the comprehensive potentiality of the latter. We have an organic relation of motivation between us and the world, such as the body possesses the world in a certain way while gearing itself to that world. In normal daily experience our actual body is at one with our virtual body - the first being the one which the spectacle requires - and the actual spectacle is at one with the setting which our bodily attitude projects around it.
The body is a potentiality of movement and the perceptual field, it is an invitation to action. By responding to this invitation the subject receives what Merleau-Ponty calls the enjoyment of space[9] through the existential constitution of a ‘spatial level’, gearing the body to the world.
This disclosure of primordial spatiality as inseparable from our very being in the world, enables us to comprehend why the awareness of our contingency prompts loss of secure foundations , horror, nausea (as described is Jean Paul Sartre’s novel of the same title) and, if engulfs us sufficiently long, the schizophrenia which finds everything amazing, absurd, or unreal.
Consequently when interacting in an environment, senses are spatial since they provide access to objects, each sense opens onto the same all-embracing space. The absence of such a common space would preclude the plenitude of the object - and hence its very being as an object for consciousness.
Sensation is not an inert quality or state or the consciousness but it is a structure of our being in/for the world. Spatiality is inseparable from sensation and it becomes unintelligible to regard any of the senses as non-spatial.
Sensing, is how Merleau-Ponty defines the phenomenon of perception, the ‘natural self’ or the ‘subject of perception’ senses Cyberspace. We must cease to consider colors, shapes, sizes, coordinates as a purely physical phenomenon or an intellectual construction, instead we must recognize sensation as a living dialogue between the body and its existential environment.
All the features and characteristics of Cyberspace, are a certain manner of being-in-the-world which implies a certain presence of a particular atmosphere and the body’s power of responding to it. Consequently these features do not mechanically trigger off the adopting of the bodily dispositions , nor does the taking up of a particular body attitude suffice for seeing the color if the environment fails to offer the solicitation.
The bodily intentionally manifest itself in Cyberspace: we are not disembodied observers, but rather bodies who hear and see and feel the sensible. Sensing is neither a passive registering nor an active imposing of a meaning, to sense something is to co-exist or ‘communicate’ with it to open oneself to it and make it one’s own prior to any reflections or specifically personal act.
If we continue on regarding the world as pure matter and the subject as transparent consciousness, the phenomenological description of sensation as a form of coexistence or of communion between the body and a being located beyond it, will seem extremely confused. If we suspend our philosophical prejudices we will acknowledge readily enough that there is no thinker standing behind our ears nor ears when we hear or see something, or when we stretch out on the grass and loose ourselves in the sky. Who among us has not lost itself in the sky? Why should we dismiss that experience as a confusion or illusion?
By virtue of having a body we are already so many sensory fiends thanks to which we open to the world, exploring it. Sensing is an open ended activity anterior to and presupposed by specific personal existence. And it is through sensing and through our personal existence that we can view Cyberspace as a perceived, conceived and lived space.[10]
The perceived space of Cyberspace is defined as producing a spatiality that embraces a certain production and reproduction of a particular location and of particular spatial settings. Cyberspace as perception should guarantee a certain degree of cohesion, of competence and performance, and the perception of space is revealed through the deciphering of the space, directly sensible and open to measurement and descriptions.
The conceived space defines a ‘conceptual space’ of planners, of programmers that identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived. Cyberspace as a conceived space is also tied to the relations of production and design, and could therefore represent the dominant space, being the space where ‘utopian’ thoughts and visions of a new semiotic and of the creative imagination could come alive.
Cyberspace as a lived space, or as a space of representation as Lefebvre calls it, represents a complex, coded symbolism of images that accompany the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’. Here the real is combined with the imagined, not necessarily privileging one over the other. The lived space of Cyberspace is the terrain of generation of ‘counterspaces’, spaces somehow born from their subordinate, but positioning themselves more and more as dominant and pervasive.
Anchorage in Virtual Spaces
The location of Cyberspace could be seen through the words of Jean-François Lyotard as Landscape: «There would appear to be a landscape, whenever the mind is transported from one sensible matter to another, but retains the sensorial organization appropriate to the first, or at least to a memory of it.»[11] The user of the digital environment and the landscape of Cyberspace could collude in the generation of what can be called Placescape, such as a place that we experiences when venturing beyond the border of familiarity. We therefore need to decode the new signs or ‘trailsigns’ and establish our own movements and marks, the trajectory, finding our own way.
For this specific reason Cyberspace stimulates our imagination, it is our electronic network in which al possible virtual realities realize themselves. Cyberspace as a medium, invites to participation, representing all the referral points thanks to which we manage to find our way among the proliferation of data. Living and interacting in Cyberspace, means building a mental map in order to ‘navigate’ in the system. Even when using a personal computer we need our own internal representation of how everything is connected. It is precisely this ‘map’ that constitutes the location of Cyberspace. In its most simple form, Cyberspace unchains the creative imagination of the user, in its most complicated forms it is able to create a simulation of the real world: real virtual environments.[12]
Orientation like in any other environment is achieved through the interaction of the user with the digital world: individual - landscape, bringing ourselves into conformity with the configurations of the landscape. The conjoining of the surface of ourselves, our bodies with the surface of Cyberspace generates the Interscape that creates orientation. Thanks to the interscape, the ‘map’ I am able to orient myself in the placescape that becomes marked, measured, perceived, remembered by my actions. So the realization of place itself is actually what takes place between the user and the landscape.
But what is this place? But what does virtual environment mean? When we say that Cyberspace is a virtual space we mean a space that is not like ‘the real one’, but that is as operant. The word ‘virtual’ can be referred to a linguistic distinction formulated in medieval times by the logistician Duns Scoto. Scoto was using the Latin term virtualiter in his theory of reality, explaining that the concept of a thing does not contain its empirical attributes in a formal way (as if the thing itself was known besides the empirical observations) but virtually (virtualiter). Even if we need to go deep inside the experience of things to discover the quality of something, the real thing already contains its many empirical qualities, but it contains them virtually. Scoto used the term ‘virtual’ as a bridge between a reality unified in a formal way, defined by our conceptual expectations, and our experience. It is in an analogous way that we use today the term ‘virtual’, to bridge a given location and a further level of growth and enrichment introduced in it by human action.
A virtual world has to be ‘not really real’, if not it would not capture our imagination. Something that is ‘less real’ would stimulate our capacities of perception and visualization. It is imagination that allows us to take what we see or feel and rebuild the symbolic components in a mental vision. Imagination is an ‘escape’ but it can also represent the implementation of new factors in our lives that sometimes change our life conditions. Imagination has to receive in order to create.
The degree of realism, is by principle without limits, and this realism can become irrealism: if Cyberspace becomes indistinguishable from our ‘real’ space, the interaction would be too passive. There are some factors of the ‘real world’ that we can anchor upon in order to avoid that the digital environment would be flattened to a reproduction of reality, like an unuseful ‘déjà vu’. Cyberspace stimulates imagination only if it does not reproduce the characteristics already given by reality but it transforms them in order to be unrecognizable and new. The characteristics of the real world that I am referring to are: the couple natality/mortality, the movement between past and future and anxiety.[13]
One of the bonds that the real world functions upon and that gives our existence a finite quality, is our mortality. Because our life has such a quality we are used to distinguish different periods that go one into the other, to introduce hours and deadlines with which we organize our life. We are born in a specific moment and we grow up with relations and interactions. These limits impose existential parameters giving us a sense of ‘being rooted’. Natality and mortality are part of our anchorage to reality and a bond imposed upon them is temporality, such as the flux of events that goes from past to future and that we try to dominate with memory and the sense of history. Theoretically we can not erase anything of what happens in our lives, this is what gives to our actions the characteristic on uniqueness. Due also to the temporality of biological life forms, our world is often penetrated by a sense of fragility, precariousness and anxiety that makes us suffer, like in a case of loss. These characteristics are what give human existence the stigma of reality. They are our anchorage to reality.
Cyberspace therefore should not contain neither death, nor pain, nor preoccupation. The elimination of all the finite bonds could prevent the digital environment to conserve a degree of reality, to construct an empty environment on top of it, a reflection of the world, to which we are already anchored. Cyberspace should do much more: should stimulate our perceptions, not replicate them. Cyberspace should become an environment for action and reflection , producing philosophy not redundancy. Cyberspace is a philosophic experience, maybe an experience of sublime or of the sacred[14], since sublime according to Immanuel Kant is a sort of shiver that runs down our spine when we realize how small our finite perception is in comparison to the
infinity of the possible worlds, of the virtual worlds that we can build and live in.
Cyberspace will tend to let loose the bonds that anchor the world, but not to drift without goals nor points of referral, but being able to explore and to find new points of anchorage.
To measure oneself with the development of technology means rethinking, renovating, and reviewing the fundamental structure and the conditions of culture; it means understanding how behaviors, reactions, and events that were once a part of the domain of imagination are now real, verifiable, and licit. We all consume imagery, and the relevance that entertainment has today as a mainspring of technological development shows us to what extent ‘non materialistic’ aspects of our lives affect our daily routine. Technology allows us to free ourselves from the ‘labyrinth’ of reality. New technologies give us an unexpected and new sense of freedom: the extension of our perceptions, of our logical and mental functions augmenting our space of action and interaction.
It is evident at this point what Cyberspace does: it reproduces the unreal, and enhances the condition of human perception, demonstration thus that reality is a matter of perceptive models not of pure and simple recording of data, reality implies a relevant mental activity. We finally reduced the distance between reality and imagery, having the ‘implosion’ of the imagery in the real.[15] The imagery collapses on the real in a very radical way: if every medium from the written word, to cinema, to television is considered an extension of our senses we can reach the conclusion that the computer, representing the digital environment, is an implementation of our being.
The more we push ourselves further in the experience of the environment, in the relationship with the machine, the more we exchange our interior with the exterior. The more we abandon the ancient relation of immersion in a natural environment and we create a distance from our biological origin, the more technologies resemble the substance of dreams.
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[1] Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 27-28. «What happens in space lends a miraculous quality to thought, which becomes incarnate by means of a design (in both senses of the world). The design serves as a mediator - itself of great fidelity - between mental activity (invention) and a social activity (realization); and it is deployed in space».
[2] The ‘Avatar’ in Neil Stephenson’s novel Snowcrash is a shared social digital environment, where you access by wearing a stereoscopic helmet and loggin in the matrix of the computer.
[3] Leibniz. Recueil de lettres entre Leibniz et Clarke, Cinquième écrit. 37.
[4] Foucault, Michel. Of Other Spaces. Heterotopias.
[5] Ibid. 19-20.
[6] Considering Cyberspace an extension of the concept of Heterotopia.
[7] Deleuze, Gilles. Mediators. 628-633.
[8] In Greek ‘meta-’ indicates both something beyond (like in the Latin ‘post-’) and also related to a change (in Latin ‘trans-’) of place or nature.
[9] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception.
[10] In The production of Space, Henri Lefebvre gives a clear understanding of a trialectic thematic, inter-relating a linked triad of three ‘moments of [social] space: spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space), and Spaces of representation (lived space).
[11] Lyotard, Jean-François. Scapeland. 212.
[12] Stone, Sandy. «We need to guide ourselves - remember cyber means steer - in all our assembled forms and multiple selves right between the two towers of promise and danger, of desire and technology.»
The War Between Desire and Technology . 97.
[13] Heim, Michael. The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace.
[14] «But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the things signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness» Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity, preface to the Second Edition, 1-3.
[15] Implosion a term often used by Jean Baudrillard.