Maria X MIT presentation slides

Is There a There, There?(or, Allergic to Utopias)By Dr Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka

Maria X]

School of Arts & New Media

University of Hull, UK

Is There a There, There?(or, Allergic to Utopias)

1st Act.

Cyberspace:

Space or

Metaphor?By Dr Maria

Chatzichristodoulou [aka

Maria X]



Is there a there, there?

(Allergic to Utopias)

Which is the space of live(d) performance?

Pics: SwanQuake(2007) &Summerbranch (2005) by Igloo

Is there a there, there? (Allergic to Utopias)

Cyberspace. Virtual Worlds. Augmented & Mixed Reality

Environments.

Are they spaces? Or are they networks?

Are networks spaces?



“Cyberspace was once thought to be the modern equivalent of the

Western Frontier. It was a place, albeit an abstract place,

where land was free for the taking, where explorers could

roam, and communities could form their own rules. It was an

endless expanse of space: open, free, replete with possibility.

No longer. As with the Western Frontier, settlers have entered

this new land, charted the territory, fenced off their own little

claim, and erected “No Trespassing” signs. Cyberspace is

being subdivided. Suburbs and SUVs cannot be far off.”

Hunter, D., 2002

Is there a there,

there?


“No Trespassing” signs in

Second Life

Is there a there,

there?


SUVs in Second Life



Cyber-Space or (cyber)

Metaphor?



Duplication of spatial power

dynamics

Spatial cognitive functions



(Realistic) Suggestions?

A number of “code-based environmental disasters” such as

the loss of privacy, censorship, and the disappearance of

an intellectual commons are currently occurring.

Lessig, 2007

“Abandon metaphors altogether”: real-world property

assumptions are being forced onto the online

environment.

Hunter, 200)



“Space is neither a „subject‟, nor an „object‟,

but a social reality – that is to say, a set of

relations and forms.”

Lefebvre, 1991



“What is missing from cyberlaw‟s narratives about „cyberspace‟

as a catalyst for fundamental change (or as simply more of

the same old thing) is a sense of the body in cyberspace:

of cyberspace as produced by and producing embodied

experience. Cyberlaw scholars have largely ignored the

bodies in which selves and groups reside, and therefore

have overlooked literatures that might help to illuminate

networked space as experienced space.”

Cohen, J., 2007


2ndAct.

Space as

Social

Morphology

(Tea with

Lefebvre)

By Dr Maria


Maria X]





“Vis-à-vis lived experience, space is neither a mere „frame‟,

(…) nor a form of container of a virtually neutral kind,

designed simply to receive whatever is poured into it.

Space is social morphology: it is to lived experience

what form itself is to living organism, and just as intimately

bound up with function and structure. To picture space as a

„frame‟ or container into which nothing can be put unless it

is smaller than the recipient, and to imagine that this

container has no other purpose than to preserve what has

been put in it – this is probably the initial error.”

Lefebvre, H., 1991



Error?Ideology?



• A(ny) revolution, in order to realise its full

potential, needs to produce a new space.

• A revolution that does not achieve this might

have changed “ideological superstructures,

institutions or political apparatuses”, but has

failed to change life itself.

• “To change life (…) we must first change

space.”

Lefebvre, H., 1991



• „newness‟ of emergent spaces

Virtual worlds

• Lack of accumulated & fixed social signifiers

Do not mean • Consequences

for networked performance practices as artistic activities?

& As social activities?



Living „in space‟

Living „in time‟

Movement =

inscription of time in

space



„natural space‟: script of natural

time„modern space‟:

time has vanished from social space



• Threatening to political power

Lived time

• Consumed, exhausted. It leaves no traces.

Our time



Space is

Bodily senses that experience

it

Gaps and tensions in-

between bodies



Networks become spatial when

performed as spaces.

Pic: The Endless Forest by Tale of Tales (ongoing)


3rd Act.

My Body‟s

Other:

Looking Into

Foucault‟s

Mirror

By Dr Maria


Maria X]





Q: What occupies

space?

A: “A body –not

bodies in general,

nor corporeality, but

a specific body”

Lefebvre, 1991

Pic: TranSfera by SUKA OFF

(Intimacy, 2007)



“Space – my space- (…) is first of all my body, and then it is my

body‟s counterpart or „other‟, its mirror-image or shadow: it

is the shifting intersection between that which touches,

penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand,

and all other bodies on the other. Thus we are concerned,

once again with gaps and tensions, contacts and

separations. (…) space is experienced, (…) as

duplications, echoes and reverberations, redundancies and

doublings-up which engender –and are engendered by- the

strangest of contrasts: face and arse, eye and flesh,

viscera and excrement, lips and teeth, orifices and phallus,

clenched fists and opened hands (…)”

Lefebvre, 1991



The body as a “social,

cultural and

historical

production.”

A. Balsamo, 1995

Pic: ReiDishon (Intimacy, 2007)



“In the mirror I see myself there where I am not, in an

unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the

surface: I am over there, there where I am not, a sort

of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that

enables me to see myself there where I am absent:

such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a

heterotopia (…). From the standpoint of the mirror I

discover my absence from the place where I am

since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze

(…) I come back toward myself; I begin again (…) to

reconstitute myself there where I am.

Foucault, 1967



“Utopia seeks a future that itself has no future, a

future in which time will cease to be a relevant

factor, and movement, change and becoming

remain impossible.”

Grosz, 2001



Bibliography

BALSAMO, A. Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture, 1995 In: FEATHERSTONE, M. and BURROWS, R. (Eds) Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London & New Delhi: Sage, 1995.

COHEN, J.E. Cyberspace as/and Space. Columbia Law Review 107 (210), January 2007

FOUCAULT, M. Of Other Spaces. (Tr. Miskowiec, J.). Available from: http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html, 1967

GROSZ, E. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001

HUNTER, D. Cyberspace as Place and the Tragedy of the Digital Anticommons. Available from: http://ssrn.com/abstract=306662, 2002 [accessed 3/08/2010]

LEFEBVRE, H. The Production of Space. (Tr.: Nicholson-Smith, D.) Oxford & Cambridge MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd Edition, 1991

LEMLEY, M. Place and Cyberspace. California Law Review [online], 91, 2003

LESSIG, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, 2006

PHELAN, P. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London & New York: Routledge, 1993

SINGER, J.W. Entitlement: The Paradoxes of Property. Yale: Yale University Press, 2000

YEN, A.C. Western Frontier or Feudal Society? Metaphors and Perceptions in Cyberspace. Berkeley Technology Law Journal [online], 17 )1207), 2002

http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html

http://ssrn.com/abstract=306662



Thank You.

Dr Maria Chatrtzichristodoulou [aka Maria X]

Director of Postgraduate Studies

Lecturer in Theatre & Performance



[email protected]