multispace

These days, a satellite in orbit can encircle the earth in ninety minutes. Space becomes a sort of time, an experience measured in time terms. We are not talking about distance, but about duration. Space implodes with the acceleration of transport machines. In addition, real space is left void; we live in the virtual space of tele-transmission. We do not live just on streets and in houses anymore, but also in cables, waves and webs. We are tele-present in the absence of space. Wherever we are, we are absent and where we are not, we are omnipresent.
The immaterial space of telecommunication, the immaterial virtual space of the digital era, is not only a space of absence, a space that is missing, but also a new space of presence, of tele-presence, a new space situated beyond physical experience, spaces that have become experimental though the use of telematic machines and invisible time spaces. The radar is the best example to show how the collapsing of real space and the end of time are not the only effects of absence and lack , but also develop something productive and new.
In this way, the radar is the instrument with which we are able to move around the middle fog, in an “annulled space” allowing mathematical orientation in a black and empty space. In this way we do not loose anything, just the opposite, there is something we gain: virtual space is the space of absence, the space that is invisible and shaped only through mathematics. In other words, the space provided by the radar is a virtual space that does not belong to the conventional historical world.
More than ever, we move around in a multispace of telecommunications that is gradually substituting real space. As in the case f absence in relation to real space, it is not only substituted by it , but also enriched by it, and in the same way, the era of absence means an enrichment, a transformation of the historical ways of appropriation of time and space, of body and experience.

posted by Serotonin @ 29.11.06