Re: <documenta X><blast> fields

Jordan Crandall (xaf@interport.net)
Sun, 15 Jun 1997 19:13:38 -0400 (EDT)

Through the examples here it seems that both "de-spatialization" and
"spatial/topological restriction" are appropriate: commercialized
spatialization on the web--bound up in "ease of navigation"--can be a device
for insituting authority over movement and choice, often in the guise of
interactivity and illusory public space, and, as Brian suggests, the removal
of spatial criteria from mechanisms of communication and trade in Home
Shopping can be bound up in a mechanism of control. But we're just skimming
the surface: the dynamic has to be situated, as Brian indicates, in an
architecture of interfaces and communications circuits, and as Brandon
writes, such things as lighting, display organization, and other spatial
orderings. And then, by situating these, to understand what they mobilize (a
shopper down the aisle?), what forms of transport they entail (even
access-mode as transport), what kind of buyer and behavior pattern, what
desire, what faculties.

Brandon writes that the layout of a retail floor space isn't terribly
high-tech. But that's not the store--the store is situated in a larger
playing field, which is very high-tech. It's rich to think of retail space
in terms of a crossplatform tectonics: the location of the store is not
bound by the walls, or is a container for racks of products; it's infused
with ways of distributing information, opening channels, controlling flow,
creating desire, etc., in which the walls and structures are like artifacts
of processes (buyer behavior patterns by way of market research, flexible
accumulation modes, etc.)--between which a shopping subject fluxes (in and
out of embodied modes and forms of distance-traversal). Within the playing
field are subjective, visual, and behavioral modifications, where embodied
rhythms are annexed to the paces of market demands. Here is where the
temporal enters into the picture in a powerful vector that cuts below
perception; it's the frequency underneath, like the rates of the wheels
turning under the shopping carts.