Sherry Turkle - Simulation and its Discontents

To follow up on the conversation at the end of our class meeting today, some of you may want to take a look at Sherry Turkle's Simulation and its Discontents. Turkle looks at simulation - how we adopt technologies that create virtual environments, allow researchers to model and visualize processes, and practice in digital spaces - and how we question (or continually immerse ourselves in) new ways of thinking. She presents studies she did at MIT in the 1980s and in the 2000s to provide a context for discussion about adoption, worry, and critiques of simulation in the sciences, engineering, and design. Four essays by other authors illustrate uses of simulations in space and sea explorations, architectural design, and molecular biologists.

It raises questions about the ability to be critical of technologies and their output, the function of creativity in computer-aided design, and connections vs. distance in simulated and/or virtual environments. I thought of this work particularly when we were talking about cyborgs in terms of where human ends and machine/technology begins.    

Cyberspace in architecture - historical trajectory?

In examining cyberspace in architecture, I am taking the opportunity to push beyond an easy conflation of cyberspace and the internet. I want to situate my notion of cyberspace in the history of architecture. In Cyberspace: First Steps  (1991), architect and theorist Michael Benedikt defined cyberspace as “a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality.”[1] To some extent, Benedikt’s definition resonates with my continually developing working definition for the term. The focus on computer technology specifically is tricky as I’d like to think more broadly about technology, but within architectural culture major shifts in representation and design have coincided with the advent of computer technology. Architects have been producers and consumers of programs that redefined what was possible in terms of architectural expression. I believe elements of cyberspatial thinking existed long before the term came into common usage in the 1980s, so I have chosen the 1960s as a point of departure for examining connections to architectural thought. The 1960s were a time of reimagining the modern city, early usage of computer technology in architectural practice, and continual critique against the sterility and attempted purity of modern architecture. Since the 1960s, many architects have been using computers as part of their design process and have drawn on the possibilities of new technology to push the at boundaries of what can be done with buildings.

           

Inspired by new technologies and responding to conventional architectural norms, some architect’s designs were primarily articulated on paper as commentary and exploration. Archigram (Architecture+Telegram) was group that developed in the early 1960s by young architects Peter Cook, David Greene, Mike Webb, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton and Warren Chalk. The initial output of the group was a series of publications (newsletters/magazines) that presented new ways of imagining architectural projects, urban forms, and social connectivity. They were not only calling into question their most recent forbearers (modernists) but the fundamental ideas of constructing spaces as stable, solid buildings. “Archigram’s designs destabilized the fundamental assumption that architecture is a static art: Archi-gram was unconvinced that a building’s firmitas (solidity) was the necessary precondition of its utilitas and venustas (utility and beauty), as Vitruvius’s foundational equation of the Western architectural tradition had ordained.”[2] Archigram was rethinking their field of practice and in doing so, they were reimagining, designing, and communicating new ways of conceptualizing spaces – from the individual home to urban landscapes. They were inspired by and responding to the changing social landscape. There is no singular argument made by the group and in fact there were “ongoing heated arguments between various members of Archigram as to what architecture might be, or what it might do, in the dawning age of technological innovation and consumerism.”[3] The group sustained their discussion on architecture, consumer culture, dynamic lived experience – and created predominantly paper architecture that was influential in capturing the imagination of some in the art and architectural communities. Archigram is predominantly known for only a handful of their designs, but a recent project by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster, has made visually constructing an understanding of their work more possible. The Archigram Archival Project brings together digital versions of their work that exists in many different collections. The digital archive is a further step in communicating the design ideas of Archigram.

           

Walking City In New York, Ron Herron, Herron Archives

So, why cyberspace? And why consider Archigram within the context of thinking about cyberspace? Much of how I define cyberspace and how I try to force myself out of the trappings of conflating it with the technologies at hand – computers, cellular phones – has to do with engaging in imaginative practices. Cyberspace is not limited to the internet or other relatively recent developments, but it is deeply technological. Archigram’s projects visualized the ways in which urban life were changing in response to technology. During the 1960s, “the city became seen as an immense node of communications, a messy nexus of messages, storage and transportation facilities, a massive education machine of its own complexity, involving all media, including buildings.”[4] The individual architects in Archigram used the idea of connectivity, transportation, and media to rethink spatial organization as cities became networks, home and automobile merged, telecommunications and advertising were ubiquitous. Monumental, permanent, absolute structures gave way to flexible, dynamic, hybrid proposals for inhabitation and transportation. “The projects included the famous Walking City, Plug-in City and Instant City, which variously proposed the use of pods, capsules, megastructures, inflatable or temporary components, cars, furniture, clothes and gadgets to replace conventional building forms.”[5]

           

Room of 1000 Delights, Peter Cook, Archigram Archives

How is cyberspace spatial expression? There is a sense of fantasy within cyberspatial expressions in architecture, but not for the sake of whimsy alone. The fantastical is used to push at boundaries, to seek new ways of conceiving of spaces, to sort out what we want from architecture. Much of what was done by Archigram was contemplative studies on the experience of space in a new highly technologically mediated reality. In some ways their contributions can be seen as reflections in and of cyberspace as alternatives to the more concrete forms of traditional architecture. Despite the individual members being firmly attached to the academy, Archigram was working outside accepted architectural building practice. They wanted to be revolutionary, “above all to resist categorisation, to overthrow convention, to reinvent things, to refuse to be tied down, to challenge endlessly, and to work through spontaneity, reaction, naughtiness and fun.”[6] Their work engaged the technological developments that were occurring and changing the experience of the social environment, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. Their designs serve as representations of their positions as critical of architectural practice and open to exploring the possibilities of new spatial constructions.

             

Daniel Libeskind, Proposal for Guggenheim Museum in Vilnius

What I see as a potential continuation of the discussion about cyberspace and architecture is the spirit of revolution in design and the use of computer technologies to articulate new spatial realities. The virtual reality of computer programs that allow for detailed architectural modeling can be seen in the designs of many contemporary architects – such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind. I do not wish to slip into a technological determinism that assumes that the technology drives their design vision, but there is reason to believe that the full articulation of their works in built form is highly dependent upon computer technology at this point. 

Libeskind, for instance, maintains a firm which “has extensive resources and experience in computer aided design, with Macintosh and PC computer workstations used to produce 2D and 3D presentation materials, working drawings, and construction documents.  The office uses email and FTP sites to furnish design documents to consultants all over the world and maintains a video conferencing facility.”[7] While the firm continues to use traditional sketches, drawings, and models within their design process, perhaps it is in the mediation between the virtual and the real – computer-aided and paper – that cyberspatial thinking contributes to spatial expression. Libeskind wrote that “an architectural drawing is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges.

Daniel Libeskind, Jewish Museum Berlin

In any case, a drawing is more than a shadow of  an object, more than a pile of lines, more than a resignation to the inertia of convention.”[8] A drawing is a communicative instrument and an exploratory opportunity. One of Libeskind’s goals is to create expressive spaces that are transformative, communicative, and expressive of contemporary culture. He uses technology to push at the boundaries of traditional spatial arrangements to engage, disturb, and delight his audience.

Halfway through constructing this paper, I realized that I chose to start this piece from a distance of roughly 50 years, after proclaiming in a previous post that we need not do that. While I still believe that it may not be necessary and we can critique contemporary work, I will continue to try to contextualize what I see as developments in architecture. I am intrigued by distinctions between evolutionary and revolutionary ideas in architectural expression. How much have architects revolutionized their practice in the last fifty years? When did the revolution begin? Have technological affordances made what was once revolutionary design more mainstream? On some level, Archigram seemed to be responding to ideas about humanity’s relationship to the machine within architecture that had been prevalent since the Industrial revolution. Architects who have been loosely collected under terms such as Deconstructivist – including Daniel Libeskind, have continued the exploration of cyberspatial expression, using technological developments to physically allow for the digital creation and engineering of their built work.

In architecture, at least for these architects, I think that virtual reality (though they’d not use the term) was and is a space for imagination – a test ground for what may become real – or built. Archigram’s designs were real in the intention of the ideas but remained virtual in the sense that they were never meant to be fully articulated in built form, they were almost – and always seeking more. The virtual can be seen as place for engaging possibilities – but in the act of communicating, the presentation has consequences. Much of Libeskind’s career was spent in the virtual realm where he was communicating his ideas, but took time to turn toward creating “real spaces that work.”[9] Having not experienced his built work myself, I am hesitant to speak to how well his spaces work, but I understand they have a tendency to feel powerful. In that, perhaps they can be considered a revolution of sorts.

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[1] Michael Benedikt, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 122.

[2] Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 6.

[3] Kester Rattenbury + Murray Fraser, “Archigram Archival Project,” The Archigram Archival Project, EXP, the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster, Accessed March 20, 2011. http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/about.php?pg=text

[4] Michael Benedikt, ed. Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 16.

[5] “About Archigram,” The Archigram Archival Project, EXP, the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster, Accessed March 18, 2011, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/about.php?pg=archi

[6] Kester Rattenbury + Murray Fraser, “Archigram Archival Project,” The Archigram Archival Project, EXP, the Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster, Accessed March 20, 2011, http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/about.php?pg=text

[7] “The studio,” Studio Daniel Libeskind, Accessed March 19, 2011. http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/studio/the-studio/

[8] Daniel Libeskind, Countersign (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 14.

[9] “Daniel Libeskind's 17 words of architectural inspiration,” February 2009. TED: Ideas Worth Spreading http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_libeskind_s_17_words_of_architectural_inspiration.html

Using technology to create an embodied book

Tired of reading Google Books online? Miss the feeling of a book in your hands? Want to publish your own bound work? Check out this story about the Espresso Book Machine at McNally Jackson.
Here is a video about how it works as well.

What, where, whose is cyberspace?

In her introduction to The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Linda Henderson situates a selection of modern artists within a turn-of-the-century context in which scientific discovery and creative culture coalesced to encourage experimental work within the arts. She draws from the history of scientific development to consider the worldview of artists, illustrating that art is not created outside the cultural consciousness of its time, and that science and art are not intellectually mutually exclusive. In the period between 1900 and 1920 (roughly), there were discoveries, new theories, and popular culture ruminations that brought into question the nature of physical reality. Henderson states, “the complex spatial possibilities suggested by the fourth dimension, as well as the curved space on non-Euclidean geometry, were the outgrowth of developments in early nineteenth century geometry.”[i] Notions of space, particularly the fourth dimension, engaged artists’ imaginations and creative impulses, allowing them to push at the boundaries of their own craft or practice – in painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, they responded to the scientific and mathematical developments in physics and played with the visual possibilities afforded by the nebulous fourth dimension. She argues for a consideration of the scientific and cultural context as a worthy point of departure for evaluating modernism, claiming, “the varying approaches of artists in each of these nations [America, France, Italy, Russia, and Holland] toward the new geometries and their frequent alterations of the original prewar Cubist ideas on the subject provide valuable new insights into the character of a number of modern movements.”[ii]

One hundred years later, artists work with in and through new media to create/respond to/inform the cultural context within the Information Age. Their responses to the discoveries, theories, and popular culture are similarly pushing at the boundaries of their disciplines – creating new types of audio performance, buildings that read as sculpture, literature that defies convention, art that is continually questioned. Can we engage the art of the present – or must we wait... develop a historical perspective, come to understand the time as an era with some definition from which we can critique what was created. Much of the digital age will be lost... is continually lost... in transition.

In addition to the three areas of daily existence in Yoruba thought – the world of the dead, and the world of the living, the world of the unborn – Wole Sokinka, in “Appendix: The Fourth Stage,” articulates a fourth area, using Ogun, the god of creativity, as the embodiment of individual agency. A tripartite temporal organization breaks experience down into past, present, and future and all are well defined and not viewed as mysterious. “The past is the ancestors’, the present belongs to the living, and the future to the unborn.”[iii] It is in the liminal space, the transition – that the creative spirit must undergo self-dissolution or destruction. In the “fourth area of experience, the immeasurable gulf of transition,”[iv] one is disconnected, fragmented, transformed. Ogun, embodying human will and the contradiction of destruction and creativity in man, traverses the abyss, bridging the gap and re-creating the self. Soyinka describes the effect of the transformation as “the sensibility of the artist, and he is a profound artist only to the degree to which he comprehends and expresses this principle of destruction and re-creation.”[v] It is not only through the transition experience, but the full immersion in dismantling the self and re-emerging that the creative spirit engages. Soyinka’s engagement of Ogun suggests both a temporal as well as spatial experience of individual identity – in acknowledging a gap within a seemingly continuous temporal trajectory that Ogun continues to engage in physically. He stands of the edge, immerses himself in the abyss, and bridges the gulf – of a metaphysical fragmentation.

We too are poised at a gap, an intellectual abyss, where we must choose how to engage with the transition(s) in representation. Perhaps it is only the artists who can traverse the void, but I’d like to consider this a time for re-envisioning the artist. Can we embrace destruction and re-creation – in art, in the academy. Our landscape is made up of these spaces for self-definition – liminal spaces between the defined fields of presence.

William J. Mitchell argues that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are creating “continuous fields of presence,” potentially extending and physically distributing cyberspace with little geographic limitation. He presents a short historical argument on the development of technologies, particularly in the last thirty years, that have led to the current state of “spatial indeterminacy” and “nomadic technology.” Mitchell draws from examples in the education and medical fields and considers the implications of new technologies for the workplace. He touches on the shifts in notion of public vs. private and social ramifications as community begins to mean something very different that it did even 20 years ago. The cyberspace he is engaging belongs to the relative elite, those with a cell phone and laptop computer who have found they can work from anywhere and will not be “willing to give up the benefits of continuous connection.”[vi] Mitchell extends a great deal of agency to the technology, at times coming across as a bit of a technological determinist – even though I know this does not fit with his scholarly persona. His cyberspace is in the process of becoming less physically bounded – as he argues that, “continuous field of network presence have begun to blanket public spaces.”[vii] The implication of his argument is that this is a progressive move toward further, more complete “fields of presence.” His is primarily a discussion of the physicality of networked systems – where they are accessed and how the presence of ICTs shapes behavior within these spaces.

I wish to inject a bit more human agency into his narrative. His tale is a familiar one that rings true for anyone who has attended an undergraduate lecture in the past few years or owns an iPhone. We see evidence of the expanding field of presence as cities are beginning to provide wi-fi in public parks and engineers continue to develop technology that will make the need for such things obsolete. The necessary flexibility of environments – from your workplace expectations, to the appropriateness of an intimate conversation, to the physical structure of buildings – is worth further exploration, as increased flexibility potentially comes with decreased certainty. How quickly must we evolve in response to the technologies we create?

Stephen Graham engages the popular spatial metaphor of cyberspace to explore “three broad, dominating perspectives” on information technology in space. Substitution and transcendence, co-evolution, and recombination perspectives are concerned with the development, use, and future of technologies within human social life. Coming from a technologically determinist perspective, substitution and transference assumes that technologies “directly cause spatial and spatial change.”[viii] Cyberspace is an alternate reality to the physical, embodied world. The extreme extension of this view is that of a virtual existence, in which our physical environment is replaced by electronic or digital simulation space. Simulation becomes reality? In co-evolution, the second perspective, “complex articulations are emerging between interactions in geographical space and place, and the electronic realms accessible through new technologies.”[ix] Experiences in cyberspace and physical embodied life are co-produced and in constant relation – interacting and shaping each other. It is significant to note that Graham recognizes, in this second perspective, “the development of new telecommunications infrastructures is not some value-neutral, technologically pure process.”[x] Technological advances reflect and produce power relationships. Recombination perspective takes a relationship view in which “there is not one single, unified cyberspace; rather, there are multiple, heterogeneous networks, within which telecommunications and information technologies become closely enrolled with human actors, and with other technologies.”[xi] Time and place exist in multiple, fragmented, socially constructed varieties.

There is no cyberspace, but cyberspaces that are contextually and culturally constructed – in place, in time – and within social, economic, and political conditions. Who is the creator? What power do individuals have within the multitude of cyberspatial variety at their fingertips? Can one cyberspatial embodiment be used to subvert the power of another? What are the connections between cyberspaces – and are they connected to any physical reality?

Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman developed Asphalt Games in an effort to encourage New Yorkers so re-engage with their physical embodiment of the city through a digital competition. Using an online map to claim territory, players vie for control of street corners through a performative experience of acting out stunts electronically generated and assigned. Cyberspace is a space for re-creating the physical landscape of New York City, an environment for expressing a player’s creative talent, and a place for commentary on the creativity of other players’ performances. It is map, gallery, and peanut gallery. Place takes on a heightened significance as context is of prime importance for judging the value of a performance. Place is also extended however, to the surrounding landscape. Cyberspace as performative environment is open to all (New Yorkers) who are willing to be the spectacle – to engage in what may be difficult, transgressive, illegal, funny, embarrassing.

I wanna play! I think...

Federico Casalegno’s “Thought on the convergence of digital media, memory, and social and urban spaces” presents a conceptualization of cyberspace as a place for social engagement – where the primary aim is to create an environment for communication. He is working from an ecological methodology and attempting to create a system for community memory sharing that builds on “the synergy between physical places and people who make them come alive.”[xii] His work is focused on the social considerations of communities – physical and virtual. Virtual communities are spaces for community members to engage, through sending information, sharing memories, responding to their lived experience through poetically contributing to cultural heritage. Virtual places are reflective of the physical world, but there is a fluidity in the memory project. He states, “memory exists only through this constant and permanent alteration. Living memory does not have a precise, fixed, and static boundary.”[xiii] The idyllic description of the project seems to discount the possibility of any power issues – social, economic, political – that might emerge in the sharing and documentation of memory.

The attempt to create a cyber space for the masses – to provide an environment for a whole community and not just the elite computer owning intellectuals is an valuable idea for documenting cultural heritage. It extends the possibility of writing history that is more open to the complexity of everyday life. By trying to construct a collective memory, I wonder how the power dynamics play out. Is there no privileging of an individual or groups memory? No contested spaces/ideas/remembrances?

In “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” Michael Heim confronts examines human desire – for knowledge, control, identity – through the development of technology that is changing the way we experience being human. He states that “the computer’s allure is more than utilitarian or aesthetic; it is erotic.”[xiv] We are “enamored of the possibility of controlling all human knowledge.”[xv] Advances in symbolic logic and technology (thanks Leibniz) have made the development of embodied Platonic ideals, in the form of patterns of information. According to the intellectual trajectory of his argument, “there exists, according to the monadology, one actual universe... The harmony of all the entities in the world come from one underlying operating system.[xvi]” The seemingly positivistic notion leads to what Heim reveals is a paradox of the erotic relationship with technology. Once you create the cyberspace reality, you become omniscient – the lure of technology, with it’s offer of infinite knowledge is weakened once the knowledge (however individually constructed) is attained. We now face a less than sexy “threat of total organization.”[xvii] Our individual identity is an embodied identity with all it’s messiness and mystery.

Ah, controlling all knowledge – the aim of Google. Are we relinquishing the mystery of technology if we are not the creator of our cyberspace? Does the fact that someone knows all – has the supreme power of organization within their grasp – diminish the quixotic lure of technology? I think the threat of loss sustains the excitement a bit. Our cyberspace – our constructed reality – has an intriguing impermanence – as if our relationship is always fleeting, continually transformed, constantly new. I am always in relation.

N. Katherine Hayles, in How we Became Posthuman, is primarily concerned with “the erasure of embodiment” that occurs as we trade our material bodies for the privileging of information and technology. The migration to posthuman continues the devaluing of the body that Hayles argues has been intellectually occurring in the consideration of humans who, “identified with the rational mind, the liberal subject possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body.”[xviii] Embodied subjects, with their individual sex, race, and ethnicity complicate the matter of thinking about universality. In the creation of cyberspace, and virtual realities, the body has been denigrated, a sort of destruction of material selves. Hayles wants to push for the re-consideration of the embodiment within virtual reality. In her discussion of presence vs. pattern, she places the material body in opposition to information. By the end of chapter 2, she acknowledges the necessity – for the sake of self-preservation I imagine – to conceive of a world where presence and pattern co-exist and compliment one another. She contends that “information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated, local, and specific.”[xix] There is always a medium.

Cyberspace extends the boundaries of our reality by removing us from the physical limitations of our corporeal identity. By privileging the digital experience, some truth of our selves is lost in the erasure of those elements we select out of our representation. What does a embodied virtual reality look like? Does virtual retain its meaning?

What is cyberspace? Shifted frames of reference outside the physical reality of everyday life, created by rhizomatic connections between technologies. There are multiple cyberspatial instances, overlapping, multiplying, yet individually constituted. It is always becoming and fading simultaneously. Dynamic, performative, value-laden.

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[i] Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Introduction to The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), xx.

[ii] Linda Dalrymple Henderson, xxi.

[iii] Wole Soyinka, “Appendix: The Fourth Stage,” from Myth Literature and the African World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 148.

[iv] Wole Soyinka, 148.

[v] Wole Soyinka, 150.

[vi] William J. Mitchell, “Post-secondary Space,” in The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology, ed. Pramod K. Nayor. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 84.

[vii] William J. Mitchell, 87.

[viii] Stephen Graham, “The End of Geography or an Explosion of Place: Conceptualizing Space, Place, and Information Technology,” in The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology, ed. Pramod K. Nayor. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 92.

[ix] Stephen Graham, 95.

[x] Stephen Graham, 99.

[xi] Stephen Graham, 101.

[xii] Federico Casalegno, “Thought on the Convergence of Digital Media, Memory, and Social and Urban Spaces,” in The New Media and Cybercultures Anthology, ed. Pramod K. Nayor. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 121.

[xiii] Federico Casalegno, 121.

[xiv] Michael Heim, “The erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[xv] Michael Heim.

[xvi] Michael Heim.

[xvii] Michael Heim.

[xviii] N. Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4.

[xix] N. Katherine Hayles, 49.

Welcome to my cyberspace

I was initially drawn to the discussion on visual culture in cyberspace from my academic interests in architecture, technology, digital artifacts, and I am pleased to find connections to topics I haven’t visited in awhile: space/time, self-definition/ destruction/recreation, virtual reality vs. actual reality. In my academic endeavors, I am primarily concerned with the sustainability of historical practice as objects used for scholarship are digitally created. From my perspective as an archivist and information studies scholar, I am always considering how to document and preserve artifacts as evidence of creative expression, as well what these artifacts communicate about their creators and their social environment.

The idea of historical distance, as it pertains to analyzing art is intriguing to me, since I am well aware of the potential for loss. The rapid advancement of technology continues to allow artists and designers to push the boundaries of their work, extend their reach, and play with new media. The same advances require audiences (including historians) to engage these artists and their work without the typical 50-year distance.

I am concerned about the potential for scholars of the future to engage the art of the present. At the same time, this blog is a place to consider when/if/how/why we can/should preserve the cyberspatial creative expressions of the present. Should we extend our practices for documenting, analyzing, preserving creative works in a physical realm to new environments? Can we apply similar methodologies – or may we/must we rethink the kind of engagement scholars can have? Values and methods questions arise for artists, historians, and curators.

My blog will likely be a space to raise questions, struggle with difficult concepts, and think/write through ideas I have about cyberspace, visual culture, artistic representation, new forms of communication and connection, and finally the preservation implications for evolving modes of creative expression. And then there is architecture...