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.