Wim Nijenhuis via brian carroll on Thu, 2 Sep 1999 03:23:32 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Virilio and Architecture |
(forwarded with author's permission- published in upfront magazine) Dwelling in Cyberspace Wim Nijenhuis glocaal@worldonline.nl In 1853 the American Matt F. Ward wrote in his travel journal: The fabulous beauties of England should be as fleeting as visions from a dream. They are most attractive when we rush through them at forty miles an hour. The route does not require any attention or meditative contemplation. Although the neighbouring objects seem to fly by as swift as arrows, the faraway fields and trees do not withdraw themselves from perception; they stay in sight long enough to leave a stable impression. Everything is so quiet, so fresh, just like at home; there are hardly any particular objects that catch the eye or divert the attention from the fascinating whole. I dream myself through these soft beauties as if Iím floating through the sky, quick as if Iím riding on a tornado. Still today, Wardís description of train travel covers our possibilities to describe dwelling in cyberspace. Most of the images used derive from religious discourse on heaven. At first there is the sense of being displaced, of being disconnected from daily surroundings, which are now offered to the gaze as a set of images. Then there is something like an identification with the sight of an angel, and its ability to float. In addition, there is a quality of detachment, not only in a spatial sense - a physical distance between the spectator and the surroundings - but also in the sense of a certain indifference that allows one to view an undisturbed whole, to see the totality - a privilege theoretically reserved for the eye of God. And finally, the entire quotation expresses a tendency towards immateriality by means of the metaphors of the dream - the floating, the silence and the freshness; it expresses that one can not be touched, least of all by dirty things. Collectively these qualities of existence - displacement, detachment, floating, the view of the whole, the immateriality and the softness of the environment - could be described as heavenly. This way to experience the train surfaced in the literature of the nineteenth century in exaggerated form, but if we look at current statements and films about cyberspace, like Lawnmower Man, where people have to be installed in gyroscopes in order to simulate the free-floating movements of their bodies, or at William Shatnerís Tekwar (1994), where we see people floating through soft spaces at high speed, where many appearances are so transparent that they allow a kind of hyperwholeness of perception by means of superimposed images, and where the actors can step through walls and are always burdened with the question: is the environment an illusion or is it real? Then we witness that the dream of immateriality increasingly becomes a technological possibility. This space-type completely opposes the traditional space of architecture and urban design. For thousands of years, the space of the city has been based on material construction; the house and the city constitute hard, immobile, stable spaces, in which our material bodies move about. To estimate the likelihood of a certain techno-social development, and its influence upon the form of the city, we must investigate within which play of power and within which value system it possibly could happen. So I will step back in history in order to find a trend that can be extrapolated into the future. In the past the form of the city has been determined by two major values, both dependent upon military technological developments: safety and wealth. In the era of the fortified town that lasted until about 1800, the city was essentially a territory - not in the sense that it was the property of a community, but in the sense that it was a guarded field, a spatial extension, surrounded by fortresses. This field was controlled and defended by military power, but offered its inhabitants safety and therefore the possibility of wealth. So the value and the seductive power of the city derived from the security it offered, and its wealth was generated by the passing flux of trade. The flux of traffic was the excluded from the city. This floating component of society had to be controlled because it was seen as a carrier of violence. All economical and military energy of the city therefore was concentrated at the city-gate, the point of exchange with the floating environment which was simultaneously a threat and a source of welfare. This dual character gave the gate the quality of city-edge, where all types of marginality were concentrated. The properties of this city were the hardness of its materials, the protection offered by its fortresses, and the exactitude of its geometry. By means of Euclidean geometry such a city could be represented in maps and scale-models that were considered to be true representations of its reality. These exact maps were used for the constitution of the nations in the nineteenth century. Think of the land registry, that in a juridical sense determines what is private and public property; think of the definition of a territory in which a law is valid and all the political and juridical institutions that depend upon the exactitude of territorial representations. The representation in maps and its isomorphic relation to a stable reality provided the citizen with secure means of orientation, also in the sense of the clear distinction between the important and the unimportant, the here and the there, the near and the far. All these qualities of the city-field, with its well-arranged parcels, were deconstructed, step by step, by the railroad - the so-called first industrialisation of space and time during the nineteenth century. The most significant change was in the perception of distance, due to the influence of the accelerated speed of transport and its increased comfort. No longer the dayís walk; no longer the fatigue of man and animal that limited the journey; no longer the thunderous violence of horses dragging coaches along bumpy roads, over hilly landscapes, causing tremendous involvement in the act of travelling itself, as we can read in the testimonies of Goethe, Ruskin, and Flaubert. The train allowed the journey to continue day and night. It introduced the comfort of travelling, of moving smoothly and steadily in contrast to the bumpy galloping of horses. And because it moved over hard, smooth rails that were placed on levelled ground, the train eliminated the experience of the surface of the earth. As a result, as many nineteenth-century authors noted, the train disconnected the passenger from the environment. Ruskin felt so disconnected that he slept, or pulled a blanket over himself, during the journey. This attitude expresses that one experienced the journey as a kind of non-time, as an absence of consciousness. The journey was a void between the points of departure and arrival, an elimination of the space in-between. To the traveller, this represented a short circuit in space, a direct connection between the place of departure and the goal of the journey. Mentally this meant the implosion of space. Points that were formerly far away from each other, were suddenly lumped together in one overlapping juncture. The first reaction to this new perception of distance was mental retreat, like that of Ruskin. But a next generation developed a new perspective. They looked further away, but in doing so they oriented themselves on the whole, on the overview, rather than giving special attention to details or particular objects. We could call this type of view panoramic. In a literal sense this view also implied a growing indifference of the spectator. The perception in perspective, that was based on the depth of the impression/representation, became a flattened-out orientation, a view of the surface, as nineteenth-century panoramas. This flattened mode of perception then was followed by the transient view. The totality was no longer a matter of the scale of the perspective, but was the result of a series of intervals viewed from the side window of the train through the intermitting rhythm of the telegraph posts. This mode of perception conditioned the public for the cinema to come, but it also inaugurated the idea that the static representation of the surrounding world by means of maps, paintings, drawings, and photographs did not correspond with reality. In the efforts to adapt the mode of representation to the experience, the landscape and the city entered the realm of soft representation. They were caught in an order of the quick change of images. The environment became fluid and vague; it lost its static character. The exact measures, sizes, and locations of nearby objects got lost in the whirlings and turbulences of a speed that was intensively experienced. After the fortress had become obsolete due to the increased power of the guns that could bombard a city by firing over the walls, it was the attack not of the enemy, but of the train that caused the definitive collapse of the fortified city-field. To be absolutely secure, defensive systems had to be of enormous sizes and thus had become prohibitively expensive. War moved over to the mobile strategies in the field, as did Napoleon. And at the same time, the strategy for prosperity changed with the rise of capitalism and the ideal of free trade. Even before the invention of the railroad, the entire system that supported an economy of the delay - toll-barriers, guilds, territorial rights, bad roads, flooded lands, city-gates, and so on - was rapidly removed in favour of measurements that would stimulate the free flow of goods, labour forces, information, and productivity in general. So, prosperity no longer derived from the power to delay flux, but from the power to stimulate it. In this light, the city was no longer conceived as a territory, a defendable field outside the flux of traffic, but as a kind of station that had to give free way to traffic. The characteristics of the well-designed place were exchanged for the concept of the system, or the network. The city had become a set of dispersed points that had to be connected. One oriented on the most important points and the quickest connections between them. The city-network, or the city-system, is ruled by the calculation of movement. Accurately speaking, the city became a space-time. Town planning, from that moment on, was a split activity: on one hand it tried to organise the network of traffic with its logistic dimensions, and on the other hand it continuously raised the problem of the territory with its geometric dimensions. Baron Haussmanís plans for Paris, conceived and executed between 1853 and 1869, are exemplary of the way the traditional territory was destroyed in favour of a dynamic network. His boulevards, which were cut out of the existing building structure, can be seen as a continuation and metamorphosis of the railway trajectory. Their rectilinearity mirrors the railway trajectory; their width corresponds not only with traffic needs, but also with the panoramic view; the uniformity of the faÁades corresponds with the undifferentiated perception. On the boulevard, one travelled not on foot, but, as we can read in the works of Šmile Zola, mounted in a coach, in order to see and be seen. On several levels the boulevard continued a process that in a more general sense started with the train. It installed a relative disconnection not only in the space, but also between the people of a social totality. This second type of disconnection can be demonstrated by the relationship between a group of people sitting in a passing train and the inhabitants of the village it passes through. For a moment the passengers and the inhabitants share a place, but are they one social group? This phenomenon of disconnection had all kinds of implications for the social community of a city. In painting and in literature, the modern phenomena of departure and separation became regular themes that were described with a beautiful melancholic sentiment. The impressionists tried to fade the images in the play of light and focused on the theme of loneliness; the futurists tried to express the whirling and the vagueness, the fading of reality in their paintings. In my opinion, the car and the highway did not add much to this in an essential way. It was themes like these - the boulevard, the station, the passing, the shrinking of space, and the logistical organisation of movement - that concerned architects like Sorio y Mata, the Russian Disurbanists, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and many others in their explorations of the cityís transformation into a network-like totality. With electronics, the transmission speed of messages and images is increased to lightspeed, and the characteristics I formerly described - the disconnection from the everyday environment and the interconnection of places - are no longer experienced by means of literary exaggeration, but belong to the reality of everyday. High-speed communication tools like the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio, had existed for some time, but their influence on urban design was minimal because they did not intervene in its specific domain: the visual representation of a place. This intervention came about, however, with the introduction of television, video, and the computer. I will concentrate on the medium of video. The train revealed a culture of the short circuit, the connection, the sticking together of places. It did not represent these phenomena, but produced them. In this sense, the train can be seen as a revelation machine that made visible and invisible that which was already present in the material world. It revealed a broken morphology and an imploded space. The video is also a revelation machine that reveals a mutual penetration, a fusion of one place with another, and it does so in real time, which is the consequence of the transmission of the image at the speed of light. We can imagine the mutual penetration of spaces if we consider a situation that has become a common daily reality: the placement of a camera at the front door of a building that is connected to a monitor - a television screen - somewhere inside. What happens here is the metamorphosis of the traditional view of an environment. In that sense the (surveillance) video replaces the window. Thanks to its transparency, permitting the visual contiguity of inside and outside, the window offered a direct view on the surroundings. Through the window we had contact with the adjacent environment, and this fact has been of tremendous importance for the architecture of houses and their positioning in the city. But does the video operate by means of transparency? Does it offer a view on an adjacent space? If we imagine two persons who have a conversation by means of the video apparatus, they donít share the space, the spaces are not even adjacent as is the case with the window; they only share the time - the real time. Space has been divided because the video has been placed in-between. This in-between is not transparent, but a machine which converts the light reflections of a place into waves, sends these waves through cables, or the air, and converts them again into a luminous image of a place. For this system, the contiguity of spaces, the transparency of the view, and the distance are theoretically of no importance. The video adds to the light of day and the light of lamps, a new kind of light that electronically shines upon a surface and makes this surface reappear on another spot at an indiscriminate distance. In this sense, the video inaugurates the indirect illumination of the environment. Contrary to television, video at first does not inform us about events, or sequences of actions, but about places. It provides the spectator with the immediate view of a place. Video does not represent space in the way a map, or a drawing, or the theatre does, but shows its reality. It presents a place. The place of the spectator now is redefined. The video constitutes immediately, and in an interactive way, a place and a time-space that has nothing to do with traditional topography and the whole of geographical and geometrical distances. By nature video installs a kind of tele-topographic localisation, of which local television could be the model. Through the conversion of light into energy, video is an apparatus that presents appearances of surfaces. The apparatus offers the possibility to connect these appearances over more or less great distances and to revert them. The connection and the reciprocity of the reception and transmission that manifests itself on the screen of the recipient is the expression of the mutation and the commutation of the distances, which in their elasticity could be understood by means of topological geometry. But because the images are transformed in energy in order to be transmitted, we cannot describe this system as a kind of relativistic perception, as I described in regards to the train. Perhaps we should reserve for the geometry of the video the term: tele-topology. The square, the theatre, and the cinema - the places of performance and representation - have been replaced by the image of the place. Essentially the city has been defined as a unity of place. The transmutation of places by the video replaces this classical unity of place with the unity of time. Within this system, the size of the screens is of no importance; neither are the dimensions of the objects. What we view on the screen is a place at a distance, that before our eyes appears as an illuminating energy. Between a certain amount of perceptible surfaces, to which the video reduces all space-surfaces, arises a new kind of centre, a new place of staying, or dwelling, that we could name a tele-bridge. Thanks to this tele-bridge, the environment changes into an opto-electronical tele-reality, that consists of the tele-presence of places and for which the real-time is the unifying concept. Distance is of no importance, the difference between far and near canít be distinguished any more by means of the system itself. To the experience of the tele-dweller the video-surrounding is distanceless and global. By means of the manipulation of the switch, one environment can be relieved by the other at random and the value of the place is not dictated anymore by its situation within the urban system, but by the duration, the amount of time people choose to spend watching it. We see that the video redefines almost all of our classical terms and concepts for describing and understanding the city. The opposition is so strong that the nostalgic concepts of the city constitute an obstacle to viewing and describing the reality of the video. Cyberspace will add to this fluid geometry of the electronic environment the three-dimensional experience and the possibility to mix it with numerically generated images that exist nowhere in reality. Next it opens up the possibility to combine cameras with vehicles to give us a fleeting glimpse of places, like that which we can experience from cameras mounted on Formula One racing cars. The transparency of the transient view then merges with the appearance of the video-image. For this kind of view - this combination of the metamorphosis of the window and the windscreen of the car - I propose the term: trans-apparent view. The transparent view will change dwelling in travelling; it will create a new entity in which dwelling and travelling are indistinguishably fused. When combined, the video and the computer can produce an opto-electronical and trans-apparent environment that will be global. This global environment will have its impact on our psychology and our behaviour, it will probably cause re-evaluations of the everyday environment that at least will become a relative phenomenon. The telecity will emerge when it suits the demands of safety and wealth. In Los Angeles, when offices couldnít function because of earthquakes, companies rapidly installed fragments of the tele-city in the form of tele-work. We all know the role video plays in surveillance which is linked to safety, and it is very likely that companies will try to commercialise the networks, as is now the experience of internet and the digital-city project in Amsterdam. The city is not only a phenomenon whose geometries are deconstructed by the electronic media; it is also a social and political entity. The ideal form of the city in our culture has been long defined by the ancient Greek polis. From Athens to Renaissance cities like Sienna and Florence, existed the image of the city-state, the polis, with its conjunction of a given territory, a given urban community, and a democratic political representation. In regard to the future of the territorially defined community, I have already mentioned the processes of disconnection and fragmentation that derived from the different time-zones installed by the train. It is not difficult to see that the electronic media disconnect people from their surroundings in an even more intense way, also in the social sense, and absorb them into a placelessness and instantaneous community of abstract communication. In many cases this will be experienced as a liberation from the limits of the geographical accessibility, just as in the past many people liberated themselves from the village by moving to the city. But most important is the change in the nature of politics. The politics of the polis is concerned with the ground. This illustrates the close relationship there has been between city-planning and government. We could call this type of politics geo-politics. Its main object of concern is the cityís public space, its communal element, where its community can express itself. This domain constitutes the stage for public life with its spectacles and its spectators. But every scene depends upon the light that enlightens it. No light, no scene. In the 1920s the public drama extended into the evening and night by means of electric light. This light contributed in a considerable way to the perceptibility and the experience of the city-centre. It revealed the places of the urban spectacle. Because it operates with a new kind of light, the video, and in a broader sense the television, competes with the traditional site of the urban spectacle. The video brings into discussion the public and illuminated city-square in relation to the idea of geo-politics. We know that because of television, the realm of politics is no longer public space, but our own homes. Yet still, the historical relationship between politics and public space - the occupation, the public presence - remains. In 1989, television allowed the whole world to witness the student occupation of the Square of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. The students were well aware of this. But in China, nothing of this event was broadcast. Of course the students demanded it, but the authorities refused. The only thing left for them was to speculate on ëthe rest of the world,í on the tele-spectator. We, in ëthe rest of the worldí were able to view accurately the surface where the event took place, but we have seen nothing of the environment. At the same time in Hong Kong they installed gigantic screens in a stadium, where anyone interested could follow the events collectively. This constellation of fusion, confinement, and exclusion of spaces could be called tele-topical, a tele-square. The lack of contiguity between the real places has been replaced by the continuity of the real-time. For a while there was a close connection between a community in Hong Kong and one in Beijing, but only in terms of the real-time. Within this tele-topical situation, the real-time was the issue of the political conflict. Instead of broadcasting the events live, as the students demanded, Chinese television waited until after the defeat of the students to broadcast images of street riots, that were recorded by surveillance cameras that had been placed in the streets adjacent to the square. The authorities tempered the public effects of the demonstration by delaying the time of the replay. This example demonstrates that one of the most important components of urban culture, the political spectacle in public space, the demonstrative presence on the urban stage, has been replaced by a politics of time. All this could cause architect Rem Koolhaas to declare in his book S, M, L, XL, that the city no longer exists and that we are left to cope with the phantom pain we experience in relation to the lost city. The form of the city depends upon our mode of perception. We can distinguish three modes of perception: first, the perspective mode from a fixed viewpoint; second the sequential and linear perception of an environment from a viewpoint moving at relatively high speed, and third the telematic perception from a fixed place, but where the fixed viewpoint has been replaced by the moving camera. I have explained some effects of this last mode on the experience of urban geometry. Telematic communication, on the other hand, will probably take place between people who are located in interiors. If you can broadcast your image to another interior or receive the image of someone else in your interior, it means not only the metamorphosis of the window, but also the relative elimination of the door. With the door disappears the threshold, and without the threshold it becomes impossible to distinguish between inside and outside. We can just as well say that if we canít distinguish between interior and exterior, the threshold is everywhere. Through this type of communication we will witness the rise of a kind of twisted threshold that will be the main characteristic of the habitat of the future. This twisted threshold will be the interface, the place where the electronic network connects with the human body and its senses. Like the transformation caused by the fall of the city fortress, whereby the house became directly accessible from the road, and the front door became the new city-gate, the interface will become our new front door, or our new city-gate. It will put an end to travel as we know it, and will install a new kind of domestication. Architects like Peter Eisenman think this condition of linked interiors should be expressed in the building by questioning the status of the faÁade and giving preference to the section. The form of the city of the future will be determined not only by autonomous trends and technological possibilities, but also by all kinds of cultural and architectonic strategies. In their book The Invisible in Architecture Ole Bouwman and Roemer van Toorn distinguish roughly three architectural strategies: the archaic, the faÁadic and the fascinistic. The archaic strategy wants to mobilise the unrepresentable. It wants to recall a memory, even if it is broken. For this strategy, the city bears a mystical element that is related to hope, desire, faith, and immortality. The architect should not only be involved in technology and marketing but should take the place of the fool and the poet. The building should express what canít be said, its meaning should derive from the unsaid and the unspeakable residue. The archaic strategy wants to save the status of the place by reinstalling the holy characteristics it had in the past in a new way. The faÁadic strategy wants to increase the meaning of a building by means of its radiation power. FaÁadism acknowledges the crisis of the public space as a cultural dimension. It acknowledges as well the crisis of the modern architecture which emphasised the organisation of the groundplan in order to render the use of the built environment comfortable. Comfort wipes the place off the consciousness. It can therefore only be saved, as Aldo Rossi believed through the power of the architectural image and its relation to the narrative structures of our culture. Architecture is seen then as a public medium. The radiating building transfers its identity to a place, and thus positions it in a network. This is the Eiffel Tower strategy. The fascinistic strategy plays on the strangeness in order to establish a confrontation with the form. It therefore seeks a semiotic alienation of the sign from its content. For instance, it borrows the identity of its forms from the world of the machine, as in the work of Norman Forster. It views the identity of a place in its relation to the vehicular. The vehicle is treated as a kind of place. There is a fascination for the non-place, as in the work of Peter Wilson, who treats his buildings as solids in a flux, and makes use of the forms of the ship. Against the fullness of the world of mediated images, the fascinistic strategy wants to produce a certain emptiness and provide us with means to distance ourselves. The place is not something to identify with or where one can get involved in some action, but is more a kind of theatre. The fascinistic strategy states the end of history, disputes the possibility of an avant-garde, and seeks new referents for design, which are mostly found in the present world of images, be they real or imaginative. It denies the difference in status between reality and the world of the media. In that sense, the fascinistic strategy is the most appropriate for our time; it starts from a world view that does not postulate the sovereignty of man, but the sovereignty of the combined systems of man and machine. Wim Nijenhuis, 28 November 1994 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net