>Now, my point is that home shopping can nevertheless be seen as a spatial
>phenomena. This, however, takes effort, and in many ways is counter to
>the project of the home shopping corporation. It is, I believe, a
>necessary pursuit of the designer today to spatialize, or to maintain
>spatiality of these entities to counter their 'subtle' means of control.
>This begs the question, then, of the role of control systems in spatial
>domains. I'm hardly suggesting that spatial domains are free from
>control, but I am raising the question whether methods of control in
>general are actually methods of despatialization, and whether we may not
>be better off to investigate them in this light.
Brian and the rest of the gang:
We believe technology reaches its zenith when the technology disappears.
-Scott D.Cook, VP of Electronic Commerce, Microsoft Corporation
What is not somehow a spatial phenomena? Or a political lair/trap? Are they
even "subtle" methods, of control, of marketing, of distribution, of want,
of global capitalism/despatialization? Hardly. I suggest,(and this might
tie into Bracha Lichtenberg last response), that no longer are we just
content to experience the idea of nothingness, we are now hell-bent on
actually trying to inhabit it. Our newly founded digital reflection is not
merely a limit, but rather a rite of passage, a transition into what Hakim
Bey has jokingly called "a temporary autonomous zone", as we shift
seamlessly between 'the real' and ever more illusionary worlds ( MUD'S,
MOO'S,VRML, Chat-Zones, VR, you name it...). We suffer from a boundary loss
which is screen-like by nature, amorphous, and hangs silently on a binary
code which sublimely replicates death, slow death delivered by 0's and 1's
on the Home Shopping Network simulator channel.
Consequently,the gratifications and excitement of upward mobility have
slowly abandoned us (or so it would seem) to the unraveling inner spaces of
our own psychic rootlessness. As this squemish electro-'culture of bits'
threatens to absorb the space where we take place. And this disappearance
towards the invisible for all intensive purposes--has already happened.
To speak of, or even attempt to visualize form now, one must contemplate
its antithesis. Meta-attributes have replaced physical attributes,
meta-query, meta-content and meta-place. Though the dream (of having it
all, of being in control...empowered!) is seemingly at hand, this
electronic space(?) exists remotely - in the netherworld of satellite
links, communication servers, the Internet and Intranets, and so on. We
have, in effect, fallen outside of ourselves, as the once hard distinction
between remote and local stages become even further dispersed, and the
exposure intervals between time and space, inside and outside, mind and
body, imaginary and real are no longer quantifiable factors.
We are wrapped in an invisible electronic blanket, where it is no longer
even possible to get lost. "Lines of F(l)right? Perhaps. Arguably however,
the very scaffoldings of perception are becoming transparent to our willful
human gaze. This is a very strong element of the despatialization of which
you speak. I agree with the previous remarks by others, which I think
perhaps you share, that to move against the resistive membranes/modalities
of a retinal culture, is the most important level of discourse at the
present time.
Cutting through the Deleuze speak, I must ask: Are we really moving out
into the world, or is the world merely moving through us?
John Beckmann
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Beckmann
A x i s M u n d i
124 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
jbeckmann@axismundi.com
tel: 212.966.5310 fax: 212.966.3574