I lecture in a Fine Arts course that was first called "Telepresence," then "Playing with Space and Time," and is now more soberly referred to as "Studio in Space and Time" as it moves toward a more permanent place on the course roster. Space and place; this is one of the tensions we try and explore. Places occur in spaces, but what are they? Sometimes I have to go back to the dictionary to get this kind of simple fact worked out in my head.
Although as a fringe academic, I occasionally think of concepts like the origin of zero as a placeholder in number systems (we have a Mayan pyramid maze to teach the Mayan number system and it early origin of this approach), most Westerners at least seem to think of places in geographic terms. Wikipedia and Webster confirmed this. We seem to need places to go in Cyberspace, whether its a Web page, Facebook or a 3D MOG. URLs are locators. Tagging is connecting. I suppose that you could visualize a tagged 2.0 site and that everyone would start at a different place.
If Context is King (which I think I agree with), then what is the kingdom? Is this a fluid concept?
Maybe place is taking on an association with something crafted for a purpose by a person or group of people? and Tone was mentioned. Yes, virtual worlds can be used artfully to set the tone for your encounter with digital information. This can be very powerful.
We talk about Cyberspace in landscape terms and in terms of volume (terabytes these days). An accessible terabyte of data might be spread out on servers around the planet. It's place is merely the access point, and could be different for different applications.
Back in 1992, a computer scientist friend suggested that I read David Gelernter's new book "Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean" in preparation for my new job. This was my introduction to the concept of Cyberspace and it still resonates for me. When I think of Cyberspace I think of something more like outer space, no gravity and boundless dimensionality, or some kind of toric structure -- there must be a lot of eddies that circle back on themselves? Gelernter's tuples are trucking around running errands -- going places--, maybe running the world, with occassional input and output to the human dimension.
So I am stuck on a visual interface to Cyberspace; that's the kind of person I am, but I don't see the point in using only 3 dimensions, 4 with time thrown in. A friend of mine did a visualization of the distribution of plankton in a fishery in the North Atlantic. It shows a 3-dimensional volume in a cartoon way, with a ship motoring in a pattern over the ocean as the major current moves the volume of water and clouds of plankton downstream. This adds time to the space. He did this to show the irregularity of the apparently regular path of the ship's sampling path. Then he threw in another dimension. He used transparency to indicate the statistical value of the data (determined by other factors). So that's five dimensions that are easy to show while you are still in a landscape metaphor, a very distinct place.
If you have a resource like Flickr, how do you really look at it? you can explore it as a bunch of linked places, but how do you get a handle on the space and what are its other dimensions?
There are so many wonderful interfaces being designed by information scientists and they are fascinating to play with. Interactive network visualizations come to mind and they range from the Visual Thesaurus to starbursts created to give insight into genomes. How do these relate to our landscapes? We can certainly integrate them into virtual worlds in fun ways, but is there a continuum between them, or are they necessarily discrete approaches to information space?
Recent Comments