Space is more than an empty container for things. It has its own features and forms: a psychogeography. It is created through movements and flows. Information technologies complicate spatiality by simulating space, contracting space with communication and locating actors in space. Remediations of spatiality are powerful features of technoculture.

1. Technology and space
Week 6 - 7 Session 1, 2009
Technocultures
Chris Chesher
Digital Cultures
University of Sydney

2. Recent weeks
• What we’ve found about technology
• It’s experience
• It’s freedom and control
• It’s an extension of ‘man’ (McLuhan’s probes)
• It’s part of us: we’re all cyborgs now!
• It’s constructed socially
• It’s conditioned by class relations (of kinds)

3. This week
• Technologies help reconfigure how space is
perceived, conceived and lived
• Readings:
• Saco: Hardware and software: a
technotopography of cyberspace
• Hrachovec: Mediated presence
• Lecture:production of space
• Social
• Technosocial transformations of space

4. Henri Lefebvre
• French Marxist
• involved with Situationists (& later disaffected
from them) — spectacular society; recuperation
• ‘moments’ outside alienation
• A moment?
• Anne Niemetz’s 2002 ‘Curing homesickness with
Situationism’

5. http://users.design.ucla.edu/~aniemetz/homesick.klein.mov

6. Henri Lefebvre
• The production of space (1991 in English [1974])
• space is not an empty, static container
• space is produced: generated by interpenetrating
spatialities to form present space
• a unified critique must identify the generative
moments and productive processes that produce
space
• expose and decode space

7. Spatial triad
Representations Representational
Spatial practice
of space spaces
physical space mental space social space
(nature) (abstractions) (sensation / action)
perceived conceived lived
daily routines align with scientists, planners, inhabitants and users (&
routes between places technocratic subdividers artists who just describe)

8. Production of space
• ‘…walls, enclosures and facades… define both a
scene (where something takes place) and an
obscene area to which everything to which
everything that cannot or may not happen on the
scene is relegated’ POS p36
• Festivals produce different spatiality
• Representations of space:
• e.g. code of linear perspective (Renaissance)

9. http://www.ski.org/CWTyler_lab/CWTyler/Art%20Investigations/PerspectiveHistory/Image4.jpg

10. http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/dli/white-paper/dli.html
Models & Perspectives http://www.evl.uic.edu/fwang/video.html

11. Walter Benjamin
• Arcades: urban spaces
• Flaneur: idle, observer
• Crowds: anonymity;
movement
• Link to surrealism
(internal / external /
randomness)
• glass-roofed utopia

12. Harold Innis
• Time-binding and space-binding media
• Material basis in modes of transport and
communication affect culture
• Media bias (ideal of balance)
• empires have spatial bias
• time-bias authoritarian, hierarchical
• Media: material properties, systems of encoding,
and social arrangements

13. Informatic spatialities
• Saco: bitspace; network space; cyberspace
• Informatic spatialities:
• Namespace (ASCII; IP addresses/ domain names)
• Hierarchies (directories; layers)
• 3D navigable spaces: polygons; collision detection
• Relations; hyperlinks; experience of navigation
• Games: floorplans, levels, gameplay

14. What kind of space is MySpace?
http://www.myspace.com/henrilefebvre

15. Digital spaces
• Segmenting & sampling
• e.g latitude/longitude; scanned images
• Spatial compression
• networked spaces; mobile media
• Cybernetic simulations
• computer gameplay; GUI; telepresence; Google
earth

16. Jeffrey Shaw
Legible city
http://www.c3.hu/perspektiva/kiallitok/

17. Production of
gamespace

19. Rider Spoke:
Blast Theory
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsdfBAjYnh0

20. Yugo Nakamura http://amaztype.tha.jp/US/Books/Author?q=Henri+Lefebvre

21. Next Week
• Bruno Latour’s (1991) ‘Technology is society
made durable’ in Sociology of Monsters
• Tatnall and Gilding (1999) ‘Actor-network
theory & information systems research’
• Bardini,Thierry (2000). “Inventing the virtual
user’ in Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart,
coevolution, and the origins of personal computing.
Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press,
pp103–119 & 249–251.

22. Essay questions
• Q1. Analyse how YouTube appropriates and exploits other media,
with reference to McLuhan. As a cultural form, is it closest to
cinema, television or home movies? Justify your answer with
reference to specific examples.
• Q2. In ‘A cyborg manifesto’, Haraway identifies a contemporary
transition from hierarchical domination to networked informatics
of domination. Concentrate on one or two of the examples of this
transition in evaluating whether the trends that she identified in
the early 1990s have continued, accelerated or changed.
• Q3. Trace the development of a standard of Internet software (eg
web, email, swf, blogger), following a SCOT analysis. Has this
standard found closure?

23. Essay questions
• Q4. Compare & contrast different conceptions of how social class relates to
information technology (refer to the readings on Class and technology). What
are the implications of each analysis for policy and action?
• Q5. Analyse the spatialities involved in a computer game you have played: both
the space ‘inside’ the game, and the space in your house / arcade / internet
café / remote networks in which you play. What is distinctive about the way
this game works with space? Refer to the readings on technology and
spatiality.
• Q6. What is a machine? Compare and contrast Guattari’s concept of the
machine with conventional dictionary definitions.
• Q7. Write an essay that analyses how you will write / are writing / have
written that essay; with attention to how the technologies you used
contribute to your thinking and your writing. (refer to the readings on
technology and thought)